Catherine Yichen Chi

Above all the commodities in the store, I find breakfast cereals to be the most amusing. The boxes occupy an entire aisle each with a very distinctive packaging design, yet their nutritional contents are virtually identical. We receive messages from the packages promising us happiness, health and success in life. The manufacturers create performances on those little boxes to entice consumers to buy a piece of this fantasy. 
Usually, when we interact with the cereal box in the grocery aisle, just the image of a familiar fantastic character or even the color of a package is all it takes to trigger our memory of advertisements and the sweet taste of the food. By painting the boxes in white, all the static commercial images have been physically removed. The contents of the package are thus rendered invisible. The identity of the package is restored in parts first by replacing the color, then the ingredients and nutritional information, and finally elements of the advertisements. We do not notice how much these images penetrate in to our lives because they have become part of our substance. We are not only surrounded by the spectacle we are participants in it.

The Blocks of the Living are a series of self-portraits base on my personal impression and experience of my hometown. I think the community we live in provides a symbol for self-reflection. In this series, I want to express the relationship between architectural style and cultural difference, as well as the influence of the emotional condition of the residents on the residencies.

This piece represents my personal interpretation of my hometown cityscape. The most important experience of viewing it comes through interacting with it by the process of navigating through the piece. The work starts with a full view of an isolated group of buildings (a gradually growing and vanishing village) which is surrounding by a lifeless neighborhood. They are composed of different blocks of building structure and synthetic textures, which are a combination of all the unique structures and characteristics of residences from Taiwan. The buildings also reflected a personal interpretation of experience from my memory.

We live in a world that builds with products. We overwhelm by all kinds of advertisement every day, which they brainwash us and make us believe that consuming will make us happy and better people. We encounter so many temptations and traps such as sales and hyperbolic commercials. We have to fight with our desire but most of the time we just surrender to their charm.

The 2nd Performance of Dark Zone.
A performance and video event on Friday, February 14. - The Grunwald Gallery of Art

This project used camera to document the space by taking photos frame by frame while changing perspective slowly. After the process, part to the subjects in the photo (such as organic elements, walls, floor...) were removed intentionally and let the computer to regenerate the space by using a method called Content Aware Fill. Unlike our eyes and brain use perspective, distance, light, etc. to interpret the space. The computer analyzes the space based on the "content" which is pixels. These videos are a different perspective for our eyes reinterpreted the result of computers interpretation of the “content” information of the scene.

This project used camera to document the space by taking photos frame by frame while changing perspective slowly. After the process, part to the subjects in the photo (such as organic elements, walls, floor...) were removed intentionally and let the computer to regenerate the space by using a method called Content Aware Fill. Unlike our eyes and brain use perspective, distance, light, etc. to interpret the space. The computer analyzes the space based on the "content" which is pixels. These videos are a different perspective for our eyes reinterpreted the result of computers interpretation of the “content” information of the scene.

I went to Beijing this summer. It was hot, therefore I noticed and intrigued by the huge amount and variety of the air conditioners on the residencies. The ACs look like small parasitic creatures with tubes as their veins and tentacles. People spend their money to nurture the ugly creatures that grow on their houses. They produce fresh air inside but release heat and noise outside at the same time. Every tumor on the buildings represents the human nature of desire to pursue a better living at any cost.  

Click here to view Interactive Flash Version

The video installation, Advancing Bright Futures Cast Shadows, involves the efforts of the four Digital Art students who participated in IU’s first China Studio Art summer program as well as eight students from the Experimental Art Department at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.

During our time in Beijing, we witnessed the non-stop construction in the city and noted the lack of buildings older than a couple of decades. Too often, historic and culturally district buildings and homes are destroyed, leaving only memories and shadows of the past.

35 traditional paper cuttings were created and sent to us by the CAFA students, the shadows of which are cast into videos of modern building in Beijing. The juxtaposition of these two very different mediums is a visual metaphor for the difficulties China faces as the country changes and leaves its past behind.

Advance Bright FutureCast Shadow Panel 4

This is a video I made during the summer overseas program in Kyoto, Japan in 2013.

It's an animated journal of what I experienced during the trip. 

2008 Watercolor (55cmx79cm)

While turning the three-dimension objects into two-dimension images by painting brushes, the rotation, division and reduplication made the real images and the virtual images into an interesting picture.

2008 Watercolor (55cmx79cm)                    

I stepped into a serpentine alley…
The noise surrounding was almost swallowed by the careless and luxuriant green.
Listen! Can you hear the voice of the silence?

2008 Watercolor (55cmx79cm)                  
The old wall was patched by the broken and overlapped memories, it blurred gradually as time went by. However, the time won't stop nor wait. New lifes will be born and the generations will keep going forward. 

2008 oil painting (145cmx121cm)                    

The desire of pursuing happiness will never be accomplished nor satisfied. However, if one was really drowned by the sweets or the ultimate joy, is it a comedy or a tragedy?

2008 oil Painting  (72cmx91cm)               
The intricate wires are metaphors of the human connections, the crossover points and the parallel lines symbolize the unpredictable relationships between each contact and each separation.

2008 oil painting (33cmx24cm)                
This is an illustration for a story about three little elves who like to steal things, but eventually, they rescued the oblivious girl from a fire accident.

2008 Watercolor (38cmx28cm)              
This is a classic facial expression of one of my funny friends. 

2008 Watercolor (38cmx28cm)
A self-portrait.

2007 brush painting (60cmx40cm)
To control the proportion of ink and water to show the distance and substance is a crucial factor in the traditional Chinese paintings. The light, dark, wet and dry have interlaced a space of pure vitality.