CHEN HAIYAN

Chen Haiyan, over the past thirty years, has used her artistic practice to integrate the ephemeral, deeply private, fantastical world of her dreams within the fabric of contemporary China’s rapidly-changing social reality by recording and publicly disseminating her dream reality through the dual traditional media of carved woodblock prints and brush and ink painting. Uniting traditional Chinese elite aesthetics with a rough vernacular quality, style and medium work seamlessly together as Chen Haiyan renders her subject matter — dream images from her unconscious — with an unparalleled sense of emotional directness. Situating Chen’s work between dream and reality, the critic Amjad Majid writes that “while in Kafka’s work the fantastic is employed to address the quotidian horror of everyday life, in Chen Haiyan’s work it is used to shed light on its quotidian wonder.”