Chen Siyuan

Chen Siyuan (Chen Xuejun), born in Weifang, Shandong in 1967, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Qufu Normal University in 1989. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles and Beijing. From 2016 to 2021, he served as Director of the Office of the Oil Painting Art Committee of the China Artists Association. He is currently a Special Research Fellow at the Beijing Academy of Contemporary Chinese Freehand Oil Painting.

For many years, Chen has worked extensively in abstraction and non-objective painting. In recent years, however, a significant shift has begun to emerge in his practice. After decades of exploring abstraction, he has begun to look back toward his own cultural roots, seeking a new personal language from within the tradition of Chinese painting.

In his recent works, traces of rocks, pines, bamboo, flowers, birds, and other natural forms begin to appear and disappear. Calligraphic lines, relationships between presence and emptiness, and a distinctly Chinese understanding of nature and the living world are gradually entering his paintings. Abstraction remains, but the cultural experience underlying that abstraction is beginning to change.

It is a transition worth watching:

He is not leaving abstraction behind. He is rediscovering China within abstraction.

Unique East Art is particularly interested in this ongoing exploration.

For Chinese art today, becoming contemporary is not simply a matter of adopting the languages of modern and contemporary art. A more profound question is what happens after artists have experienced those languages: How do they return to examine their own cultural foundations and allow something new—and relevant to the present—to grow from them?

Chen Siyuan’s practice remains in the midst of this process.

And we believe the process of exploration itself deserves to be seen.