Skip to main content

Taiwanese Artist Ting-Jung Chen Joins Writer Meiling Cheng and Leona Chen in 1:1:2 for the Centennial Celebration of the Schindler House

  • Date:2022-09-09

The Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, the Mak Center for Art and Architecture, and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles will present 1:1:2 in a multinational collaboration from September 9 to September 11, 2022. The performance is curated by Vienna-based artist Ting-Jung Chen, co-created by Korean artists Miae Son and Yela An, with the participation of Meiling Cheng, Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California, and Leona Chen, Editor-in-Chief of TaiwaneseAmerican.org. The artists are looking forward to presenting the spirit of multiculturalism through stories and shared experiences at the centennial celebration of the Schindler House.

The Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles mentioned that this performance combined the cooperation of the United States, Austria, Taiwan and Korea to celebrate this important event in Southern California’s architecture and arts community. The Schindler House, designed by Austrian-American architect Rudolph Michael Schindler, is considered to be the first modern house in Los Angeles and an avant-garde salon for the most enlightened thinkers of the early 20th century. Founded in 1994 as an independent satellite of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, cooperated with the Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, Civil Service and Sport in preserving and promoting Schindler's architecture.

Recreating scenes of the 20th century, 1:1:2 unfolds in three parts over three nights, featuring one poet/artist per night through writing, reading, and dissolving sugar words. The performance invites LA-based poets, workshop participants, and literary and performance academics, including Mei-Ling Cheng, Leona Chen and Korean poet Jessica Kim to contribute texts centering on traditional poetic forms and structures found throughout Asia. At the same time, the artist hopes to explore the ideal of “be together” as a vehicle for deconstructing romanticized, symbolic and role-playing images of Asian cultural projections and migration through the voices of Asian history, art and culture, and gender perspectives.

Ting-Jung Chen is a contemporary performance and sculptural-based artist. She studied performative art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her art has been showcased in the “MIT (Made in Taiwan) Young Artists’ Special Exhibition” in ART TAIPEI 2020, and she is the recipient of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize in 2018 and the MAK-Schindler Scholarship in 2019. Chen participated in the MAK Center’s Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program from 2019 to 2020.

Meiling Cheng holds a Ph.D. in Drama from Yale University and is currently a professor of Theatre Critical Studies at the University of Southern California (USC) and Director of Critical Studies at the USC School of Theatre. She is also an award-winning poet and essayist, active in the international arts scene, curating, directing, and performing on the themes of performing arts, visuals, theater, feminist writing, and performance.

Leona Chen graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe's last standing chief. Chen’s Book of Cord explores state propaganda and national and diasporic Taiwanese identity. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of TaiwaneseAmerican.org and Secretary General for the Taiwanese American Federation of Northern California.