New Works

Ginkgo Space is honored to announce that Chen Yufan's second solo exhibition at Ginkgo Space, "New Works", will open on 28 September 2023 and run until 31 October.

This exhibition presents the latest works in Chen Yufan's "Derivative" series. In the artist's decades-long practice, urban migration is a spatial attribute; each space is both a geographic concept and encompasses the city's past history, real-life structure, and cultural aspirations. The city has transcended the artist's ontological nostalgia, and the migratory "landscape" is Chen Yufan's measure of the past and the unknown, a spiritual experience that has led him to constantly reflect on his surroundings and to attempt to arrive at a spiritual space outside of reality through his works.

Chen Yufan's "Derivative" series generates "The Cut Landscape" "The Folded Landscape" and "The Remaining Landscape", which are imbued with a background of cultural symbolism related to the original home. The "Derivative" series of works achieves subtle spatial changes through the flow of acrylic paint in different directions. The four corners are slightly curved, full of conflict, resistance, restlessness, and drama. Repeatedly "flowing" is the artist's repeated shaping of the character of the work and giving it the value of existence, as well as the materialization of the artist’s self-cultivation.

Nowadays, fragmented information is flooding us. Each piece of information is like a small bubble with its own independent space, and the various pieces of information presented in "The Cut Landscape" are just like bubbles, which are also mixed and uncertain. In the torrent of the information age, individual voices have lost their outlines, gradually atomized and isolated, and soon disintegrated in our memories, becoming unreal and then disappearing. In the picture of "The Folded Landscape", sensibility and rationality are intertwined and in conflict, responding to the complex logic of information and cognition in the present with abstract formal language. In the artist's view, the surrounding environment, which is affected by conflict, resistance, and insecurity, has different meanings for each person. In the ever-changing world, "The Remaining Landscape" may not be the best, but it belongs to one's own ideal scenery.

Can art change the world? It cannot. But I can make things and talk about things. Although the dimension of physical space cannot be changed, it is possible to shape the spiritual space through art.

— Chen Yufan

Chen Yufan was born in Putian, Fujian Province in 1973. He graduated from the School of Art, Fujian Normal University in 1997, and graduated from the Department of Comprehensive Art of China, China Academy of Art in 2007. He now lives and works in Shanghai. Selected Public Collections: White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney), Ullens Foundation (Switzerland), Sigg Collection Foundation (Switzerland), Blue Mountain Foundation (Israel), Long Museum (Shanghai), Arario Museum of Art (Seoul)

Special thanks

Written by: Ginkgo Space

Translated by: Yi Hanqi