Dongyan Chen

Singapore-based Chinese Multidisciplinary Artist

01.04.2022  -  30.06.2022

Dongyan Chen (b.1993) is a Chinese, Singapore-based multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, NFT artist, and illustrator. Chen’s work centers around topics such as the unconscious, dreams, and language, to modern technology and history. After earlier work in painting, she currently employs different mediums, including drawing, video, text, and sound. After taking part in SomoS’ artist residency in 2019, she returned to work on a new project in the summer of 2022.

As she states,

I am interested in the potential of texts, images, and sounds to work together in montages, as a way to construct fictional stories that concern different topics. The role languages play in our daily lives is an important element in my work. Being bilingual, I often use both Mandarin and English texts in my work. My artistic objective is to construct immersive art experiences that are able to engage audiences on a deep level. Drawn particularly to sound and video, I aim to create an experience that can lead the audience into a dream-like state, provoking self-revelation.

Dongyan Chen, Artist’s Statement

 

Dongyan drew from an early age and loved reading Manga and comics when she was a child. Learning oil painting in school, led her to study Fine Art at university, where she began making videos and installations, pursuing artmaking to explore more about herself.

One of her biggest early artistic influences is Surrealism, especially Automatism, in which she recognized her own way of making montages and automatic art experiments. Her early deep exploration of the theme complex of dreams, unconsciousness, and unconsciousness can still be discerned in her current art projects, which often include a dream-like aesthetic or atmosphere, while her earlier engagement with automatic writing ignited her current interest in exploring the relationship between languages and the human mind.

Process-wise, Chen’s intuitive artistic workflow begins with her extensive archive of videos and photos, from which initial drawings, writings, or even ceramic sculptures and mixed media props may evolve. Eventually, these may flow into video as a medium to put all things together to create a new narrative.

Following her belief that art should be experienced rather than comprehended, Chen aims to create an art experience that can forge a deep connection with the audience through both visual and auditory senses, focusing on creating something that can provoke the audience emotionally rather than imposing a specific set of ideas on them. The audiences are not expected to look for any intention in her work but are invited to simply immerse themselves into its atmosphere and enjoy her art pieces in their own ways.

Ruiqing Tang (Curator, Jin Chuang Art Space) describes this empowering relationship with the audience as an important feature of post-contemporary art, in which “many artists break through the shell of Formalism, their works no longer limited to the artist’s personal expressions, but together with the interpretations from different viewers, act as a link to construct a two-way relationship between the artist and audience.”

Study of Hands

While line drawing of hands on black background.
Dongyan Chen
Study of Hands, 2021
video still
Image courtesy of the artist

Dongyan’s current residency project is inspired by the 1000 years old Buddhist murals of the Dunhuang grotto in China. Titled Study of Hands, the project aims to explore the richness in the forms and movements of hands. Dongyan initially drafts line drawings after the mural’s depictions of hands, then develops them into short video animations set to electronic music, that later can take the shape of an NFT or video installation. Her aim is to create a new fictional narrative by comparing, reinterpreting, and reconstructing the motifs with an interest in exploring the possibilities of modern technology engaging with ancient art. Study of Hands was presented at the Pressure Drop group show between June 21-26, 2022, at SomoS art space.

The Dream Universe of J

Video collage still.
Dongyan Chen – J’s Dream Universe, video/installation, 2018

During her first three-month artist residency at SomoS, between April and June 2019, Chen collected visual material and created new video work, in preparation for an immersive installation, developing a further segment of The Dream Universe of J, her multifaceted art project, that this time took the shape of an imaginary crime scene. Deepening her preoccupation with unconscious processes, Chen invited the audience to psychically follow her visual clues, ranging from poetic interventions and light/video installations to references to the masters of Automatism, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. “My works are primarily concerned with the realm of the unconscious and dreams, as well as the different processes to discover and articulate the hidden messages embedded in them,” she explains, “After further research on dreams, psychology, and psychoanalysis, for this work, I got my inspirations from mental conditions such as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Schizophrenia.” Disrupting linear storytelling, her associative way of working imagines the audience as a kind of investigator, each person able to draw their individual conclusions.

The Dream Universe of J was presented in the group exhibition Orphaned Memories and presented to popular acclaim at SomoS exhibition space as part of the official program of the 2019 municipal 48Hours Neukölln Arts Festival.

Residency Activities

Besides her exhibition participation and informal in-house networking throughout her first residency period, Dongyan also took part in several of SomoS’ regular P2P Feedback Sessions, one hosted by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, and another by Marcia Vaitsman, Ph.D.. She was invited to speak about her work in the Scope Sessions Media Art Salon and Artist Talks series #82, and took part in sessions #83 and #84, and also attended the SomoS’ busy exhibition program. Last but not least, visiting artist/educator/curator Frank J Stockton (Los Angeles) critiqued her work during a SomoS Atelier Tour.


Dongyan Chen received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, London, United Kingdom (2018). Past exhibitions include Distilled Revery, Untitled Space (Shanghai); Déjà Vu, Freud Museum (London), Orphaned Memories, SomoS Arts (Berlin), Across Pieces of Sky, Trocadero Art Space (Melbourne), Bidirectional Intervention, Jin Chuang Art Space, (Nanjing). Her work was longlisted for the BBA Artist Prize 2021.


Links:

Homepage Instagram
NFTs at OpenSea

Exhibition photos courtesy Cheryl Chan

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