The Great American Tour

Conceptual Digital Imagery 2012 (digital prints, edition: 5) / 2022 (NFT, edition: 1/1)

The Great American Tour is a symbolic visual journey of the artist’s learning and growth in the United States. It has been exhibited worldwide including showings at the Queens Museum, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum at FIT.

For this conceptual digital imagery series, the artist opened digital image files with a text editor and painstakingly replaced the “@” symbol found in the image source code manually with the name of the artist, “C. J. Yeh.” The results of this intervention are largely dependent upon chance, trial, and error, and they are impossible to predict. Instead of creating images utilizing image-editing programs such as Photoshop, C. J. Yeh purposefully sacrificed his traditional creative control and, in so doing, allowed this method of “imposed chance” to serve as the creative process itself. An old art concept, applied in a new way and new age, becomes a metaphor revealing aspects of his own condition as an artist trying to gain control of his destiny in a foreign land.

The Great American Tour: Cooper-Hewitt

Digital photographs of nine museums and three well-known artists’ neighborhoods in New York were “personalized” by strategically replacing the “@” symbol found in the image source code with the name of the artist. As a result, two very antithetical ideas emerged from these altered images: one singularly egotistical and the other as openly universal; each is the outcome of imposing the same strategy on the same images. One idea is that the artist successfully “leaves his mark” all over the American art scene. The other idea is how “glitching” serves to illustrate the coincidental and unpredictable nature of life itself.

The Great American Tour: MoMA

This process of intentionally inducing glitches into digital files is known as “databending.” It draws its inspirations from the practice of “circuit bending” and “glitch music,” a practice in which children’s toys or small digital synthesizers are deliberately short-circuited by customizing the circuit board to generate spontaneous and unpredictable sounds.

The Great American Tour: Guggenheim

The Great American Tour: The Philidelphia Museum of Arts

The Great American Tour: SOHO, NYC

The Great American Tour: Williamsburg, NYC