Chen Chia-Jen was born in Yunlin, Taiwan. While working on his doctoral research in the Graduate School of Contemporary Visual Culture at the National Taiwan University of Arts, he is a core member of the Open Contemporary Art Center since its establishment in 2001 and acted as its director between 2014 and 2018. Chen’s main interest is photography, including digitally altered images and direct photography. His photographs, inspired by lives in the city, reveal the conditions of contemporary urban living. In addition to the reference to the urban environment, his works attempt to evoke an unsettling sense of disturbance by highlighting the absence of photographic subjects, such as people, objects, and places. The concept of absentness, suggesting the loss of information, liberates images from the limit of visual perceptibility and the constraints of signifying readability and so his approach deviates from the established course of photography, namely the representation of reality, and generates poetic qualities to his images. For him, photography can materialize artists’ imaginations, and the surreality of the materializing process can be seen as an extension of reality itself. Chen has shown his works in the Liverpool Biennale: City States (2012) and he has also participated in the exhibitions in Paris, Lyon, Rome, and Budapest.