October 27, 2014
By Kerry Reid
What does it mean to record your experiences even as you're experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are just a click away constantly defining and redefining your own perspectives? Or are you a "narrativist" who seeks to cut a path of orderly storytelling in the chaos of information? There are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can "erase" our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The beauty of "The Hundred Flowers Project" is that Chen leaves it open-ended enough for you to pluck your own blossoms of insight about messages.