Ichen Tsou, born 1983 in Taipei, Taiwan, an artist working on performance, installation and video. She considers herself more to be a storyteller by her pictures and her actions.
She turned to the performance and started the "body sculpture"series in 2008 after her arrival in France. This turn is rooted in a reflection on her first name 逸真. This ideograph means "higher", "nature". It becomes Ichen in French, which does not mean anything. She realized that first names only correspond to one identity. Since then, she has considered the body as an object which can be arbitrarily transformed to explore potential identities...
That is why Ichen’s body is often at the center of the performances filmed, and gestures and actions are sometimes violently, sometimes slightly related to the place where she performs. As to the place, Ichen does not go for mundane and ordinary spots, for example: an abandoned house, a construction site, the ruins, they offer the impression of incomplete, broken, injured …Such states give an echo to Ichen’s own body concept at the time. The two key elements to build her body are memory and time: time transforms memory. That means, the transformation of memory is a reconstruction of the past, the presence and the desire to restore the past. Ichen thinks that memory has transformed into a desire, a motivation for 'self - sculpture' emotionally, morally, physically.
Ichen, identity, body and memory sometimes share a secret as best friends, sometimes compete as enemies who do not know each other. As Ichen said : 'I have made several attempts to discover who I am and who I am not, sometimes I prefer to know but sometimes I prefer not. I hope that the performance could one day take me to where I can meet myself. '