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Yu Chen
My work focuses on portrait painting, cultural identity, and personal stories. I was trained in both traditional Chinese painting and Western oil painting, and I combine these styles to explore ideas of heritage, belonging, and the emotions connected to migration.
As someone who promotes Hanfu and traditional Chinese culture, I’ve always been interested in how cultural traditions can be seen and understood today. This has led me to want to learn more about other cultures and use my art to build connections.
More recently, my work has focused on community-based projects. I invite people from different cultural backgrounds to share their stories with me and wear traditional clothing during live drawing sessions. Through this process, I hope to create portraits that not only show what someone looks like but also reflect their culture and personal experience.
Produced by Foreignerz
See Chen's exhibit in the Ledge Gallery
Translation
My world exists in oil and silk
I am building a language that carries itself across materials, geographies and histories.
I ask myself, how many versions of a person can exist at once?
I ask you, will you step into my memory and arrive somewhere new?
Noah Milo
Notes on the Periphery
My painting practice at the moment is based on ideas from urban designer Jane Jacobs who believed that to solve for problems of the city it helps to think about processes; to work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse and to seek for ‘unaverage’ clues involving very small quantifiers, which reveal the way larger and more ‘average’ quantities are operating. The first series helped me synthesize the causes of wicked problems in urban spaces, recounting stories from my formative years as an artist without a home. And I’m now starting a new series called “Solutions for the City” where I imagine a city aware of its past designed with compassion for its inhabitants. My fourth fashion collection explores cultural cross over of bootlegging and overconsumption in the Philippines. I’m collaborating with co-designers Yron Gerona and Harvey Nichol on this collection.
Produced by Foreignerz
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