JONATHAN CHEN’s work includes installation, composition, and improvisation. His work has been performed or installed at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Chicago Cultural Center, Asian American Jazz Festival, Sonic Circuits International Festival of Electronic Music and Art (Boston, Brooklyn), Heaven Gallery, 2 Kolegas (Beijing), D22 (Beijing), Musikfestwochen (Luzern), Deadtech (Chicago), Zilkha Art Gallery (Middletown, CT), Artemisia Gallery (Chicago), The Foundry (London), Elastic (3030), Green Mill, Labor Sonar (Berlin), HfG (Karlsruhe, Germany), Goldsmiths College (London), Eyedrum (Atlanta) and others.
As a violinist and/or electronicist he has performed as improvisor at venues or festivals such as Sounds Like Now (NYC), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Renaissance Society (Chicago), Resonance FM (London), Malta Festival (Poznan, Poland), Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago), Smithsonian Institute, Chicago Jazz Festival, as well as venues such as the Empty Bottle, Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn), Metro, Roulette (NYC), and many others. Chen has collaborated or worked with Tatsu Aoki, Anthony Braxton, Gene Coleman, Nic Collins, Andrew Dewar, Bill Dixon, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Ensemble Noamnesia, Flux String Quartet, Steven Hess, Alvin Lucier, Miyumi Project, Paul Modler, Jessica Pavone, Marina Peterson, Amnon Wolman, John Zorn (briefly), and visual artists Jeremy Chen, Santiago Cucullu, and many others.
Chen has been guest artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he also briefly attended as a MFA Art & Technology candidate in 2001/02, studying mostly with Nic Collins. He received his Master of Music in violin performance from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in 1999. In 2006 he completed his Master of Arts in music composition at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, where he studied with Alvin Lucier, and also with Anthony Braxton and Ron Kuivila. The written component of his MA thesis was on the work of visual artist Marcel Duchamp.
Chen has received grants or awards from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (NU), the Illinois Arts Council, and Meet The Composer, among others. In 2007, he completed a one-year fellowship in Karlsruhe, Germany on a Baden-Wurttemberg Stipendium where he took courses in media arts and philosophy at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung. He is currently a PhD candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where his committee includes Curtis Bahn, Michael Century, Pauline Oliveros, and Igor Vamos.
Recordings can be found on Asian Improv, Interval, and Striking Mechanism.