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.
That same year, Debris of City (都市風景論) gathered fragments of street debris caught on film into layered images that treat the city as a single interconnected whole.The series appeared in a 2018 group exhibition at China Medical University in Taichung. In 2018 they also co-published there, there X 那是因為你站在地球上 with the artist 黃庭輝.In 2019 they continued the practice with there, there, a body of work built while walking with vision deliberately blurred by alcohol, letting the same repeating scenery feel newly strange each time.A second installment, there, there vol.2, followed later that year.
