VINCENT CY CHEN

Field Projects and the Honey Pump are pleased to present Fill Me With Your Larvae, Daddy, a solo presentation of new sculptures by Vincent CY Chen. The works on view continue Chen’s exploration of the West’s fetishization of the exotic through unexpected reconfigurations of scale, color, and form, creating a taboo world built of biological oddities, sexual fetishes, and artifacts of power. Being a queer immigrant from Taiwan, Chen's work explores competing layers of otherness centering on the body. Chen’s newest sculptures draw from sci-fi horror, BDSM, parasitoids, and alien forms that lure, bate, and pray. The work takes a decolonization approach, positing when one is drawn to and desires one’s oppressor there is an insidious power dynamic at play. Fill Me With Your Larvae, Daddy unabashedly occupies the full space of the gallery and seizes the audience’s attention. The exhibition space buzzes with two vibrantly colored new sculptures—”Fill Me With Your Larvae, Daddy”, and Le Rire de la Méduse (or The Laugh of the Medusa).

Fill Me With Your Larvae, Daddy, stationed in the center of the space, depicts an ambiguous connection between the tail of a wasp-like insect and the head of an alien grub form. It is unclear if this injection is consensual, a form of mating, or an otherworldly kiss. Through a sensual rendering, distinctions between prey and predator break down. The insect depicted is inspired by the parasitoid Glyptapanteles—a wasp whose females inject their eggs into living caterpillars. Unlike a typical parasite, the parasitoid’s larva always kills its host after birth. The work also conjures the fictional parasitoid Tlic, found in the world of Octavia Butler’s 1995 Bloodchild—a story in which Gan, a young man, is sacrificed as a host for alien embryos by his mother in exchange for the right to bear her own children. Gan, torn between his horror at witnessing an alien birth and his desire to appease his family, agrees to be impregnated by the Tlic T’Gatoi. Butler has described this story as “a love story between two very different beings,” and also this is a horror story. Bloodchild is often considered an allegory for power imbalance and exploitation inherent in experiences of immigration, class divisions, and labor.

Le Rire de la Méduse is mounted firmly on the wall as if a conquered, taxidermy animal, yet ready to strike like the Medusa, whose power of petrifying gaze remains even when beheaded. The sculpture’s height creates a foreboding relationship between the head of the viewer, and the form’s bud. Like a Venus flytrap, it appears capable of grasping and consuming. Its cousin may be the Facehugger from the movie Alien—another female parasitoid that implants humans with alien embryos. Chestburster, the consequent embryo develops forcibly emerging from its host’s chest, resulting in a fatality. Le Rire de la Méduse is titled after an essay by the French feminist critic Hélène Cixous written in 1975. In the text, Cixous urges women to write for themselves and claim authority and not let men define history. For Cixous, any feminine text is subversive in a patriarchal world. Cixous’s ideology also applies to the contemporary art world, which is falsely viewed as a western invention, in which creative genius was reserved for white men. Following Cixous’s logic, everyone left outside of this narrow cannon must create for themselves and claim space and agency. Chen’s sculptures do exactly that.