👁️👁️"Eye Exercise 眼保健操" (2023) is a CGI animation currently being developed by artist Carrie Chen during her residency at Gazell.iO. The animation is centered around the widespread practice of eye exercises in Chinese classrooms, depicted through the lens of the artist's younger self-avatar. Through a playful and humorous portrayal of the act of "eyeroll," the animation explores the power dynamics at play within everyday routines and prompts viewers to consider the implications of compliance and resistance in the face of mass initiatives that aim to enforce certain behaviors or practices.

Carrie Chen is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Working with CGI animation, simulation technologies and media installation, she explores how digital figuration can be a poetic and multidimensional means to process and express ideas about embodiment, representation, ancestry and memory.

Spending time between the US and China, Chen’s practice involves examining non-western ontologies and narratives, while deconstructing and reconfiguring her relationship to her Chinese American identity and ancestry. Taking a phenomenological and transdisciplinary approach, she questions the structures of individual and collective subjectivities. She is interested in examining the entangled relationships between physical and virtual identities as they intersect culture, technology, representation and our future histories.

Chen currently teaches Visual Communication and Motion Design as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC’s Media Arts + Practice program, and is a lecturer at the Design and Technology department at Parsons School of Design. She has exhibited internationally at STRP Festival, Vellum LA, WeHo’s Moving Image Media Art Program and Epoch Gallery. She holds an MFA of Design Media Arts from UCLA, and a Bachelor of Science double majoring in Applied Psychology and Art History from NYU.