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Yanyun Chen - Risk Disappearance
Risk : Disappearance
Charcoal on Aluminum Dibond, 2021
Yanyun Chen - Tall Poppies
Tall Poppies
Charcoal on Paper, 2016
Yanyun Chen - Scars that Write Us
Scars that Write Us
Charcoal and Chalk on Steel, 2018
Yanyun Chen - Women in Rage
Women in Rage
Animation, 2019
Yanyun Chen - Hills Like White Elephants
Hills like White Elephants
Charcoal on paper, 2018
Installation, 2019
Stories of a Woman and her Dowry
Installation, 2019
Yanyun Chen - Dowry Epilogue
Stories of a Woman and her Dowry Epilogue
Installation, 2022
Biography

Yanyun Chen is on leave for the Fall 2024 semester.

Dr. Yanyun Chen is a visual artist, and runs a drawing, new media and installation practice. Her works delve into the aesthetic, cultural and technological inheritances on one’s body, investigating stories as a skin which we wear and conditions of intergenerational pain, unravelling fictional, artificial, and philosophical notions of embodiment; and are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. She builds two trains of thought throughout her works: on bodies and on constructs: in the former, she researches cultural wounds, dowry traditions, hereditary scars, philosophies of nudities, and etymology, and investigates stories as a skin which we wear and conditions of intergenerational pain; in the latter, she questions the disassociating conditions of representing and memorializing the artifice in artistic endeavors as opposed to being present to the experience of witnessing withering and death of what is outside of one’s self.
 
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 received the Georgette Chan Fellowship (2020), Andreas Teoh Contemporary Asian Art Fellowship (2021) and lectured at Yale-NUS College in Singapore (2015-2022). She was awarded the prestigious National Arts Council Young Artist Award (2020), Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners, aged 35 and below. Her works have been exhibited internationally and received numerous festival and museum awards, including Prague International Indie Film Festival (2020), ArtOutreach IMPART Awards (2019), National Youth Film Awards (2019), Singapore Art Museum President's Young Talents (2018), and Japan Media Arts Festival (2012).
 
Beyond her artistic practice, her notable publications include being the editor of 50 Drawing Exercises, written by Associate Lecturer Martin Constable (RMIT Vietnam), an art teacher’s textbook published by Singapore Teachers' Academy for the aRts (STAR) in Ministry of Education Singapore in 2016. Her academic writings on contemporary animation have been selected as chapters in the Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion manuscript, and in Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Animation Studies Volume 2: Techniques, Processes and Environments, an upcoming publication for 2025.

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