Liang-Jung Chen’s latest project shows what happens when financial survival becomes the artwork

Earlier this year when curator of the East London art prize Sandra Lam asked Liang-Jung Chen what they would like to do for their Whitechapel Gallery takeover, the artist and designer had a few good ideas floating around. “Underneath all of these exciting possibilities however, was my anxiety over my visa status”, they tell us. With their current artist visa close to running out, the London-based creative was confronted with the difficulty of saving enough money to apply for their UK indefinite leave to remain status.

“The costs of visas, indefinite leave to remain, and eventual citizenship add up to a daunting sum,” Liang explains. Having spent the past few years pursuing the most interesting projects for their practice and building a portfolio of work whilst living in London, like many of us Liang, hadn’t had much of an opportunity to save anything at all. “I found myself panicking about how to afford the next step”, they say.

Liang made the decision to put a temporary stop to creating new work and find jobs that were simply going to stack up enough to pay off their application fee, embarking on a long list of side gigs that included roles such as: a part time barista, art auction assistant, artist studio assistant, event production assistant and a visiting tutor. With their hours taken up by all of this extra labour, Liang had little time to think about their Whitechapel Gallery proposition. Then an idea arrived for them: “I’m going to present the work where the work itself is the work.”

A large part of what keeps artists and the wider creative economy going is, in reality, a host of adjacent jobs. When you hang out with other creatives, conversations are always around “visas, rent, side jobs, funding, and survival strategies”, Liang shares. “Moonlighting is one of the most common topics; so many artists have so many non-artist jobs they keep quiet about.” Despite its prevalance, it still seems to be a taboo in the creative world, as if revealing some truth to the stereotype of the poor, starving artist and shattering the prevailing fantasy that everyone should be able to make enough to live off of their creative work alone.

Liang wanted to challenge this unspoken stigma with the project they presented at Whitechapel this October titled UK indefinite leave to remain application fee (2025), an artwork that speaks to the experiences of the “growing disconnection” they have felt between their everyday reality and their art practice over the past eight years living in London. Liang wanted to see what happens when “art collapses into labour”, so they set out to document all of their efforts to save the seemingly insurmountable sum for their application in a time-based work, where their medium of choice was a colourful, live, constantly updating spreadsheet.

Liang describes this as a sort of “hacked admin document” that doubles as a playful take on a heavy topic that migrant artists feel very seen by, particularly in the current political climate in the UK. In between the lines of their Google Sheets grid are the facts and figures of all of the artist’s side gigs, but also their diary entries and reflections on this experience throughout. Liang has even documented the process of them filling out this take on a traditional format for financial information, in a short animated film that charts the living document as it shapeshifts over time.

Alongside the spreadsheet, Liang has turned to social media to document the work as both “surveillance and entertainment all in one” they say. “As an artist based in London, constantly surrounded by world-class art exhibitions, I’ve become somewhat desensitised to what “good art” means. Sometimes I find more authenticity and artistic value in Youtube or Tiktok videos — especially vlogs where creators film themselves doing everyday things. It’s like a form of self-imposed CCTV. I love how these videos become reflections of broader social phenomena with a sense of humour.”

A key reference for Liang’s social media series for the project was artist Tehching Hsieh’s one year performance: time clock piece (1980), where he punched a clock every hour for a year to mark the passing of time. “While he used punch cards and Polaroid photographs as his medium 45 years ago,” they say, “I use Tiktok and online spreadsheets to document mine today.”

For Liang, an important part of the project was freeing themselves from “the embarrassment of having to work multiple non-artist jobs just to survive”, they end. “Working across various public-facing roles with so many different types of people has been humbling. It’s made me aware of how socially awkward and judgemental I’d become after staying too long in my creative bubble, and it’s pushed me to reconsider what it really means — and what it’s all for — to be an artist. I’d like to keep exploring works like this, where creativity quietly melts into every act of everyday life.”

You can donate to Liang’s Go Fund Me for their UK indefinite leave to remain application fee: here.