Artist Statement
I am interested in tracing scars, and untangling tenuous relationships with traditions. These stories delve into aesthetic, cultural, and technological inheritances on one’s body, unravelling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment, heritage, and legacies. Using drawing, sculpture, installation, and animation, my works tenderly slip off intimate family stories which write us, written onto and into our bodies, revealed as scars on skin. Are these markers of progress or burdens of histories? Questions persist, wrestled through drawing: what intergenerational weight has been carved and carried, how does our understanding of culture, society, politics operate, what withers and writhes under the surface? How has our families marked us?
I am between cities: Singapore and Boston, and a Professor of the Practice at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University.
Artist Bio
Dr. Yanyun Chen (Singapore) is a visual artist, researcher, and professor.
ART
She runs a drawing, new media and installation practice. Her works delve into the aesthetic, cultural and technological inheritances on one’s body, unravelling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment, heritage, and legacies. These interdisciplinary works are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms.
She builds two trains of thought throughout her artistic works: on bodies and on constructs: In the former, she research stories of childhood discipline, cultural wounds, dowry traditions, hereditary scars, philosophies of nudities, and etymology, and investigate stories as a skin which we wear and conditions of intergenerational pain; in the latter, she questions the disassociating states of representing and memorializing artifice in artistic endeavors as opposed to being present to the experience of witnessing withering and death of what is outside and within oneself.
She received the prestigious Singapore National Arts Council Young Artist Award (2020) and ArtOutreach IMPART Visual Artist Award (2019). Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018), Japan Media Arts Festival (2012) and Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award (2009). She was listed on Tatler’s Asia’s Most Influential: The Culture List (2021).
Her works have been exhibited at Thailand Biennale (2021), Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement BIM (2020), and Singapore Art Museum (2018). She has attended artist residencies at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore, 2023), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland, 2022), HANGAR (Portugal, 2022) and Singapore Tyler Print Institute (Singapore, 2021).
RESEARCH
Her areas of research include Southeast Asian contemporary art, animation studies, and visual art pedagogies.
Chen graduated from the European Graduate School Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought PhD programme (2018), its Communications MA programme (2014), and Nanyang Technological University School of Art Design and Media Digital Animation programme (2009).
She is a Professor of the Practice in Drawing and Painting at Tufts University School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, USA. She was the Andreas Teoh Contemporary Asian Art Fellow (2021-2022), Georgette Chen Fellow (2020-2022) and Lecturer for the Humanities division of Yale-NUS College in Singapore (2015-2023). She also taught at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2014-2018). Outside of academia, she is the founder of illustration and animation studio Piplatchka, and co-founded publishing house Delere Press LLP.