Colleen Chen
Soundscape Installation Theatre: The Forest
“Now, this cold steel jungle is taking my body, while my soul is eagerly yearning for that forest fill with insect songs and earth’s scent.”
This artistic research project investigates the spiritual crisis in modern society based on Karl Jaspers and Byung-Chul Han's social philosophy research, spanning writing and video games. The research targets on the critical aesthetic theory of Han and the works of new media artists such as Cao Fei and Feng Mengbo, exploring how contemporary new media art walks in different directions with the contemporary mainstream digital media culture that accelerates social burnout and consumerism.
"I remember the forest of my childhood,
the playground where I could run and jump without a care,
untouched by the burdens of the world.I truly believed I would one day find that tree where gods rested,
climb to its top,
and talk face-to-face with those divine beings
tell them about the views I saw from rooftops higher than any tree.I lay on the ground carpeted with fallen leaves,
insects weaving through the layers beneath my tired body.The scattered sunlight through the interlaced branches
felt as warm as a mother’s embrace.The chorus of insect hums and rustling leaves
sang a natural lullaby,
granting me long, tranquil sleep."—— Jiamin "Colleen" Chen
Working within the context of a mainstream global sociocultural landscape dominated by neoliberalism, this project responds to Han's concept of "The Aesthetics of Smooth", which is a beauty stripped of negativity and reflection. This project also critically challenges Han's view that digital beauty inevitably leads toward this "aesthetics of smooth". Through literary and artistic practice, the project aims to raise public consciousness and encourage active approaches to addressing the modern spiritual crisis.
Based on repeated media experiments and feedback from multiple exhibitions, the original paper-based text, sound installation, and moving images are ultimately integrated into the video game project. This video game project is currently in a continuous development stage and was presented as a playthrough recording on television and a sound artwork in November 2025.
Through an iterative process where visual art and creative writing inspire each other, this work is continuously building a narrative world. It lays a solid foundation for my future long-term development of game content.
The final goal of this research is to use the medium of video games to challenge the "smooth" tendency of contemporary digital aesthetics, as well as to explore the potential of immersive narrative games as a meaningful tool for addressing modern society's spiritual crisis.
