Yanyun Chen is a Singaporean artist who excels in drawing, new media, and installation practice. Her works promote the aesthetic, cultural, and technological inheritances on one's body, unraveling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment, heritage, and legacies. These works are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. She builds two systems of thought throughout her artistic works: on bodies and on constructs.
Read MoreIn the former, she researches cultural wounds, dowry traditions, hereditary scars, philosophies of nudities, and etymology, and investigates stories as a skin that we wear and conditions of intergenerational pain. In the latter, she questions the disassociating states of representing and memorializing the artifice in artistic endeavors as opposed to being present to the experience of witnessing withering and death of what is outside and within oneself.
With an investigative lens, Chen observes the intricate relationship between art and nudity, particularly the challenges of offense, censorship, and restrictions in Southeast Asia. Her exploration unfolds as an archaeological journey, extrapolating an alternate perspective of nudity in the Western art canon.
Chen's examination of the body extends beyond its role as a material or medium; it becomes a metaphorical tool for application, transmission, and transfer. The sculpting of the body's existence as a linguistic entity in various languages shapes its implications on the living body, altering language use and contributing to the etymology of the word.
In a compelling gesture, Yanyun Chen's work stands in solidarity with Asian artists persevering in their craft amid challenges. Her exploration seeks to understand and appreciate, on their terms, the essence of humanity and the significance of the body. To her, it is a profound journey into the exploration of what it truly means to be human through the intricate exploration of the body.
Text courtesy The Columns Gallery.
