de_RUEI (Taiwanese, b. 1997), born Chen De-Ruei in Taipei, is a photographer whose art inkjet prints and instant photographs move between everyday urban scenes and Taiwanese folk healing traditions. Their photographic series turn fragments of the street and blurred, repeating moments into physical prints that stand in for memory.
In 2017 病態美學《收驚》, an art inkjet print series exploring parallels between temple medicine slips and modern medicine as responses to illness and fear, was shown at the National Library of Public Information in Taichung. The following year brought 聲色場所, a solo exhibition of art inkjet prints and Polaroids depicting street claw-machine arcades glowing at night in increasingly gaudy colors. It was staged at function house in Taichung in 2018. The claw-machine theme carried into an NFT series, Lock-in Vending Machine, billed as “a project of Claw Machine Documentary in Taiwan” and minted under the handle de_ruei on the Hic et Nunc platform.
