CHEN Liang-Jung

• TOP >
• Residency Program >
• Invited Creators >
• CHEN Liang-Jung

CHEN Liang-Jung

Participating Project	Research Residency Program
Activity Based	London and Taiwan
City / Place stayed	Tokyo
Period	2026.9 - 2026.11

Purpose of the residency

I'm taking part in the residency to test how my two current lines of inquiry — the object-based research of Hardware Archive and my newer work reading digital platforms as sites of intervention — can inform one another. Japan's hardware culture, industrial infrastructure, and everyday interfaces offer a dense, specific context to ground that question in fieldwork rather than theory.
Through visits to manufacturing districts, hardware shops, and conversations with local practitioners, I want to see whether the same reading of agency and affordance holds across physical and digital systems.
One mission I've set for this residency is integrating these directions, letting Tokyo's material and infrastructural texture sharpen where they meet. 

Plan during the residency

• Tokyo fieldwork (weeks 1–3): Visit local hardware shops (金物店) and manufacturing districts — Kappabashi tool street, Akihabara electronics parts street, Kanda tools street, and Sumida/Ota manufacturing clusters — to photograph, catalogue, and observe how hardware is produced, displayed, and used.
• Regional field trips: Four short research trips outside Tokyo to compare industrial hardware cultures — Tsubame-Sanjo and Kanazawa (metalwork/craft), Higashi-Osaka (small-scale manufacturing), Setouchi islands (Naoshima, Teshima, Inujima — industrial heritage sites reactivated as art spaces), and Nagoya/Toyota (automotive and machine manufacturing).
• Institutional visits: Engage with design and research institutions (AIST Science Square, Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Technology Research Institute, Sumida Industrial Tourism Center, 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT) and art spaces (Mori Art Museum, National Art Center Tokyo) to situate the research within both industrial and art contexts.
• Documentation and archiving: Expand the Hardware Archive through interviews, photographic documentation, and cataloguing of local hardware knowledge — covering material classification, repair culture, and industrial component use.
• Downstream outcome: Feed this research and the archival material collected into the 2027 exhibition at the Museum of the Home, extending the cross-cultural (Taiwan–Japan–UK) comparison of material culture and industrial infrastructure.

---

Supprted by

Creator Information