f The aesthetics of the multitude in Chen Chieh-Jen’s Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) – A genealogy

Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s video works directly address Taiwan’s post-martial law condition. His video installations demonstrate what I propose to identify as ‘the aesthetics of the multitude’. Through the process of filmmaking, Chen imagines the possibility of a collective political alliance. Theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the multitude rejects reductive identity politics and acts against capitalism. The multitude depicted in Chen’s work suggests a democratic potential that has the capacity to resist the sustained exploitation and homogenization that exists under neo-liberal globalization. His first video installation, Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), not only sets the tone for his later works but also signals a paradigm shift in Taiwanese contemporary art from the national to the global after 2000. I argue that Chen’s aesthetics of the multitude move beyond the contentious issue of national identity that characterizes Taiwan’s postcolonial art in the 1990s and anticipates the formation of a postnational subjectivity.