Jiaqing Chen

Jia Qing Chen's practice includes 2D animation, cameraless filmmaking, photography and live-action. Her work revolves a lot around themes of mental and psychological health, memories, emotions, love, mysticism and the everyday. She enjoys defamiliarizing the everyday as much as she enjoys documenting the everyday.

She is interested in "bad aesthetics" such as noise, imperfections, degradation and glitches, through experimenting with digital and physical manipulation, turning bad image quality into a pleasing aesthetic. It all originated from her creative habit of using whatever devices are at hand to create, so the image quality cannot always be ideal, thus she starts to find creative ways to turn the shortcomings of the machine into something pleasurable. Also as she believes that some emotions, feeling or images need to be captured at the moment and cannot wait till a time when everything technical is perfect. She often works without storyboards, letting the projects evolve organically as she progresses with experiments.