LENA CHEN & MICHAEL CHARLES NEUMANN

Lena Chen & Michael Charles Neumann are a performance duo exploring the limits of intimacy. Their practice celebrates and interrogates the all-consuming nature of love: a force both beautiful and violent, blinding and revelatory, debilitating and transformative. Merging their interests in one-to-one performance and digitally mediated experiences, they enact site-specific durational works that invite viewers to project their desires and fears. By performing affection, care, and conflict in public view, we invite witnesses to ask how a relationship exists in the context of the sociopolitical structures in which it is embedded.

Lena Chen (b. San Francisco, USA, 1987) and Michael Charles Neumann (b. Los Angeles, USA, 1978) are a multidisciplinary Pittsburgh-based artist duo.

Named "Best Emerging Talent" at the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Chen has performed and exhibited at Transmediale (Berlin), Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), and Tempting Failure (London). She completed a B.A. in sociology at Harvard University and has spoken internationally at Oxford, SXSW, Yale, and other institutions. She is currently a MFA candidate at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art.

In playful and critical engagement with emerging technology, Neumann sculpts physical and virtual bodies through participatory experiences that result in visual representations of human interaction. Neumann has completed sculpture commissions for the Pittsburgh International Airport and the Facebook AI Research Lab and has worked as an illustrator for major companies such as Disney Consumer Products, Buster and Ayzenberg Group. He holds a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and a MFA from the Carnegie Mellon School of Art.