2021
Duo channel video installation/
Digital Printing, Alu-Dibond






2021
Double-channel video installation
5 min. 50 sec.







2021
Digital Printing, Alu-Dibond
40cm*40cm







2021
Digital Printing, Alu-DIBOND
120cm*180cm




Gaia hypothesis posits Earth as an enormous organism, and the life and environment on Earth’s surface, from the land, the atmosphere to the ocean, comprise a self-regulating living organism. From a macrocosmic perspective, Chen Yi asserts that human beings are similar to microbes living in symbiosis with other species on Earth’s surface, on which they have been propagating like lichen, a micro symbiotic partnership of an alga and a fungus. With an appearance resembling mosses, lichen grows on rocks, trees and walls. In a way, because of the accumulation of knowledge and technologies, human beings have steadfastly evolved and propagated, creating multiple forms of life and social communities. Human societies have evolved from agriculture to industrialization to digitization, and from the development of energy, the invention of optical fiber, to Project Starlink, Gaia has been in a process of being rendered a cyborg. As the life of humans now extends into the virtual dimension, all the data and culture derived thereof have become part of the Anthropocenic geology.


In Lichen_, the artist uses 3D scanning technology to document information from living environment of humans. The Berlin document comprises samples collected during his art residency in Berlin, which records mainly the living environment of homeless people and their objects. Recording these marginalized homeless people in the affluent European society, the document reveals a form of adaptation in the human capitalist society. The other part of the project is a video featuring an illegal immigrant living under the city’s bridge. In the video, the man gives an account of his experiences living in the area and his way of surviving in the city. The video also shows how he decorates the space and creates with innumerous found objects. The uniqueness of his case makes him a non-normal sample.