XIAOYI CHEN

Chen Xiaoyi was born in Sichuan, China in 1992. Currently lives and works in Chengdu. In 2014, she received Main photography from the London College of Communications and was awarded the LCC/Photo fusion Prize. Chen’s work has been exhibited and published internationally; she won 2015 Three Shadows Photography Award in the most prestigious photography contest in China.

Using pictures as media of metaphor, nature as intermedium, Chen’s past works discuss about the spiritual initiative experience. In ‘KOAN’ (2013–2015) series, she used photo gravure and selected abstract landscape to make prints, and to explore the hidden reality and rules in a simplifying and abstract way. The series ‘An Infinitesimal Wink’ (2015–2016) reproduced the image of subtle details of the world, confused the boundary between the macro and the micro-concept, to overturn viewer’s experience of reality. The probe into the real and virtual image has mapped an enantiomorph for her–even though the contradictory perceptual experience freely travels in and out of the ‘cave’, it remains the same in essence. Consequently, the original phenomenon reveals things that cannot be revealed in the most direct way: existence appears to be nothingness, which constitutes an insurmountable transparent barrier.

In this project, Chen Xiaoyi is still capturing a daily mystery in broad daylight. She extends the flatness viewing of pictures into more various perceptions. Experiencing the rupture of time and daily life, Chen cuts into her own reality as the opportunity and possibility to create a cave for herself. Standing on the middle point of the unsolved barrier, she attempts to reach a synchronic structure between two spaces, in order to gain a little overflowing perception from it. Till now, her art works are no longer to confuse the distinction between reality and illusion, but to catch an echo that constantly strikes and recurs in the never-ending and non-positioning structure from the unknown void.