Chen Qiulin operates in the tense zone between tradition and modernisation, articulating the repercussions of China's constant economic growth through video, photography, and performance-based works.
Read MoreChen was born in Yichang City, Hubei Province in China. Her home city of Wanxian was partially submerged in 2003 by the construction of The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, a government project begun in 1994 that involved the forced resettlement of over a million inhabitants. The social and cultural turmoil of Chen's experience would become the focus of much of her documentary work.
In 2000, Chen graduated from the Printmaking Department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.
Chen Qiulin examines the roles that urban development and displacement play in disrupting traditional Chinese cultural norms. Her multidisciplinary practice includes photography, installation, video, and performance.
Chen's series of three video works and photographs taken between 2002 and 2004 present distinct visions of China's changing sociocultural landscape. Farewell Poem (2002) intercuts footage of her home city Wanxian's (now Wanzhou District) partial submergence with operatic scenes from Farewell my Concubine, a 1993 Chinese historical drama. Chen laments the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River (1994—2008), which displaced 1.2 million people and flooded many towns and cities.
This elegiacal approach is similarly explored in River, River (2005), which tracks two teenagers and several opera characters as they travel through Wanxian's disintegrating infrastructure. Here, Chen's hometown is presented more optimistically, with new buildings and a sense of hope for the future.
Yet this hopefulness is also subverted in The Garden (2007), which portrays migrant workers carrying huge bouquets of fake pink peony flowers to new dwellings and high rises in Wanxian. In this context, the peonies, traditionally a ceremonial symbol of new beginnings, are contrasted with the false promise of a neglected and ruinous urban landscape. Chen reveals the hidden aftermath of the rapid urbanisation that typifies China's contemporary ambition and contrasts it with traditional ways of life.
In Chen's series 'One Hundred Surnames' (2004—ongoing), tofu is used sculpturally to convey the volatility of cultural identity, communal memory, and traditional ancestry. The series began with Bean Curd of 14 February, a 2004 party that Chen hosted in Chengdu, where guests ate 100 carved tofu surnames with a traditional Sichuanese hotpot dinner.
In further video, installation, and photographic iterations, Chen carves one hundred of the most common Chinese surnames in tofu, then documents their process of decay. She highlights the ubiquity of tofu in Chinese communities around the world and its roles in connecting the lived experiences of migrants. However, Chen also relates tofu's softness and easy spoilage to the dangers of urbanisation, the 'perishing and transfiguration of tradition'.
In 2005, Chen was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize at the Biennale Internationale d'Art Contemporain Chinois, Montpellier-Chine. In 2006, she was granted a Starr Foundation Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council.
Chen Qiulin has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
Select solo exhibitions include Ruo Shui 弱水, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu (2021); Following You like a Shadow, The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing (2019); Peppermint, A4 Art Museum, Chengdu (2018); One Day, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu (2018); Another Kind of Ruin, OCAT Xi'an, Xi'an (2017); One Hundred Names, Shepparton Art Museum, Australia (2016); Chen Qiulin, Art Basel Hong Kong (2015); The Empty City, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii (2014); Selected Works, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan (2012); Chen Qiulin, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009); and The Garden, Max Protetch Gallery, New York (2007).
Select group exhibitions include Carry-On (6th), Yuan Art Museum, Beijing (2021); Flowing Waters Never Go Back to the Source, Seine-Maritime, Paris (2020); She Says, Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, Chengdu (2019); Replace with Fine Art, Art Academy of Cincinnati (2018); No Early or Late, Pace Beijing (2016); People's Park, Art Basel Hong Kong (2013); and Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, Nasher Museum of Duke University, Durham (2010).
Chen's Instagram can be found here.
Peter Derksen | Ocula | 2022
