Chen Long-bin

Patricia Eichebaum Karetzky"Longbin Chen: Content in Forms" Yishu, Winter 2004: 52–57

Chen who has won prizes in Europe, Taipei, and Japan, has exhibited extensively at galleries and museums for many years in Japan, Korea, France, (Germany), Hong Kong, Italy, London, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States, and can also be found in numerous international public and private collections. He has been awarded artist fellowship grants from Taiwan's National Endowment for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York and the Freeman Foundation. In 1995, he received the Visitor's Prize of the Sixth Triennial of Small Scale Sculpture in Stuttgart, Germany. And in 1998, he received the Silver Prize at the Osaka Triennial in Japan.

Chen Long-bin was born in 1964 in Taipei, Taiwan. He received a BFA from the Fine Arts Department at Tunghai University, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is known for using the cultural debris of our modern society, such as old, discarded books, newspapers, phonebooks, and magazines as the medium for his sculptures. Chen is self-taught in carving wood, but started showing interest in our paper culture as a viable material for art – phonebooks, magazines, and computer paper when PC’s began growing popular in 1993. The advent of the personal computer changed the entire nature of information documentation – a role books used to play. Thus, by turning paper into the original wood for his sculptures, Chen offers renewed value to the meaning of paper. He uses chainsaws, drills, band saws, sanders, and scissors, along with other carpenter's tools to shape his remarkable busts and figures, which appear stone, or even marble like from a distance.