Chen Yujun: Nomadic Painting Between Hybrid Spaces and Restless Forests

A breach opens between flaking walls and gardens reclaiming concrete: this is where Chen Yujun’s painting reassembles fragments of memory, migration, and desire. The exhibition moves in reverse, like an edit that flips time on its head, and places painting at the center as a porous language: three chapters - The Outsider, Displaced Spaces, Nature - braid together abandoned houses, hybrid interiors, and feverish forests. “Space” is the first protagonist: settings suspended between Minnan vernacular and global modernisms, cantilevered balconies and Southeast Asian arches, an emotional geography born in Putian and stretched by journeys across cities and continents. Here painting becomes a nomadic gaze: shifting structures, collage, dense surfaces that resist labels. Then nature, not as landscape but as animist force: vines searching for light, longan trees scarred and knotted, ecosystems that teach resilience and interdependence. In the Outsider canvases, the fantasy of elsewhere cracks the catalog-ready villas, weeds spill in, boundaries collapse, human order wavers. Between “I” and “We” an operative threshold opens - the studio as public lounge, exhibitions beyond the white cube, the canvas as a device for relation. Complexity and density aren’t embellishments but the grammar of a plural pictorial universe, where the intimate and the collective coexist - and painting, like a vine, always finds a new hold from which to begin again.