Yin-Ju Chen
Extrastellar Evaluations - Evaluations


Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. On the vinyl backdrop of the cosmos, depicted with sacred geometric principles, the photographs mounted on aluminum interrelate key cultural and political events with conceptual and minimal artworks from the 1960s. The photographs feature the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the beginning of the Cold War (1962–1979), the enduring Vietnam War (1955-1975), Africa’s independence movements, Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976), African-American civil rights movements and 1968 protests in Europe, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few. Together, this installation highlights the multitude of possible relations between Lemurians’ delivered information (human actions), their mediums (so-called minimal and conceptual works), and the space in which they evolve (universe, background).