Chen Yujun, The Empty Room
Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing
Through 5 December 2010
On view in Beijing, at Boers-Li Gallery, a solo exhibition of recent work by the artist Chen Yujun produced since 2008 in a project entitled The Empty Room.
CHEN YUJUN was born in Putian of Fujian province in 1976, and the most basic motivation of his work comes from the culture of the Central Min diaspora. Because a branch of his family emigrated to Southeast Asia in 1900, many of his works are concerned with this lineage and the living environments of that alien territory. As young critic Lu Mingjun has summarized, this form of mental memory and life experience creates in his artistic practice a distinct anthropological aesthetic: for Chen Yujun, the foreign land of the South China Sea represents a space of possibility or experience of the unknown, and the communication of this experience becomes the original intention of his work. His mode of painting is simple and unadorned, consisting of hybrid visions of architecture and scene, a sensation of bland vicissitude and solitude that emerges through plants, decorations, and furnishings. Such images originate in the experiential world of the artist, but exceed this experience through a unique form of communication in painting. They consistently challenge the observational logic of the viewer, calling for explorations into the unknown.
Asian Geography is a new series initiated by the artist in 2009. For some time, the notion of Asia has been advanced as a community primarily through the cultural oppression of Eurocentric ideology, such that the cultural concept of Asia actually convinces us to ignore cultural differences within the continent. In Asian Geography, Chen Yujun attempts to produce an alien space of the other, a space of Asia at once both strange and familiar. In these works, apart from the appearance of bizarre furnishings, we find that readymade objects and space constructed through the extension of all manner of lines form a unique depth within a set of two-dimensional relationships. Observing such works, the disorder, vacuity, and fragmentation of space interfere with an understanding of our own identity and existence.
Asian Geography surpasses Chen Yujun's early imagination of Southeast Asia, placing the focus of this concept within an identification of history and identity. Within this series, the artist extends his domestic space such that it becomes the geographic space of Asia. As he says:
“The entire course of my practice unfolds through the history of migration of my family, appropriating this outward trajectory primarily in order to present my own secret experiences and imaginations. Through this specific spatial situation, I attempt to depict a singular domestic space and the alienated identity of its resident.”
BOERS-LI GALLERY - BEIJING - CHINA
11 November 2010 - 5 December 2010
