Don’t Look Projects is pleased to present By the Company They Keep, a solo exhibition by Chenhung Chen (Taiwan, 1961), whose intricate practice weaves together industrial and organic materials to channel a metaphysics of the contemporary moment.
Working with discarded electrical wires, conduits, and cables—materials charged with both function and symbolism—Chen repurposes technological detritus into fluid, sprawling installations and reliefs, interrogating the intersections of energy, human connectivity, and cultural knowledge.
Her practice is deeply rooted in process and transformation. Drawing upon traditions of crochet and weaving, she employs techniques passed down through generations, reimagining them in the context of industrial refuse and urban infrastructure. By binding and interlacing these discarded materials, her works evoke the Taoist concept of Chi—the vital force that flows through all living beings—rendered in a vocabulary of tangled wire, structures, and (dis)connections. In these sculptures, the gestural and the architectural coalesce, suggesting not only the tensions between technological advancement and human experience but also the ways in which energy and life persist through cycles of use, decay, and renewal.
This engagement with dualities extends to Chen’s large-scale relief sculptures, where the fragile and the forceful, the organic and the mechanical, are in tense dialogue. Electrical cables are proxies for pathways of communication, mirroring both human neural networks and the invisible infrastructures that power, organize and manage our era.
In her series Listening, the act of crocheting becomes a meditation on movement and intuition, a physical manifestation of thought as form. Meanwhile, in Diaphanous Moments, her drawings function as visual diaries, capturing traces of her everyday life.
Drawing on her Taiwanese heritage, where Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism meet, Chen’s work channels a philosophy of balance, integrating tradition and technology, chaos and order, entropy and regeneration. In By the Company They Keep, she transforms the detritus of the digital age into poetic, spatial topographies, inviting us to reconsider the material and metaphysical infrastructures that define our existence.
