Working primarily in digital photography, Vivian Pei-Wen Chen seeks to bring aspects of the world that we ordinarily fail to see into images as unbounded as they are precisely defined. The negative spaces words scarcely touch — the quiet, neglected crannies and vast hollows of big cities, the voids that open up in landscapes, and the slight but overwhelming gaps within dense crowds — are places her eye readily resides, and form the heart of her work. A passage on nothingness from the Tao Te Ching expresses for her how the sheer darkness existing where light does not is what allows her images to emerge:

Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that allows the wheel to function.
We mold clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes the vessel useful.
We fashion wood for a house,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes it livable.
We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use.

Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11 by Lao Tzu