Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs who think you know everything about contemporary Chinese art because you’ve seen three exhibitions at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Chen Yujun, born in 1976 in Fujian Province, is not your token Chinese artist recycling orientalist clichés to please Western collectors. No, this guy has something to say, and he says it with a force that could shake the walls of your pristine galleries.
Let’s first talk about his obsession with the Mulan River. Not the Disney warrior, you ignoramuses! The real Mulan, the one that runs through the veins of his hometown of Putian. In his series “Mulan River”, Chen throws a truth in our faces that Gaston Bachelard already grasped in “Water and Dreams”: water is not just a substance, it’s a destiny. Except Chen takes the concept even further. His installations and ink paintings don’t just depict water—they embody the very flow of collective memory. When you look at his monochrome works from 2013, you’re not merely seeing a turbulent river; you’re confronted with what Walter Benjamin called “the threshold experience”, that moment when past and present collide in an explosive constellation.
And don’t come to me saying it’s “pretty”. If you think it’s pretty, you’ve understood nothing. Those ink swirls, those floating debris—they express the silent violence of Chinese modernization. They tell the story of 600,000 members of the diaspora rooted in Putian. They’re the mute cry of a culture dissolving in the vast pool of globalization. Chen doesn’t do cheap nostalgia—he’s conducting an archaeology of the present, as Foucault might say if he were still here to witness it.
But wait, that’s not all. Chen’s second obsession is domestic space. His 2017 installation “Origin of Food” is a punch to the stomach of our consumer society. Stones, sculpted wood, dishes arranged like offerings—it looks like a post-apocalyptic altar to our daily rituals. The uprooted tree painted in black and gold towering over the installation isn’t there to look pretty in your living room. It’s a visceral metaphor for our contemporary condition, what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk would call our “ontological uprootedness”.
His “Temporary Constructions” installations are even more unsettling. Recycled wooden floors, newspaper clippings peeling off the walls, an empty chair, an abandoned chest—it’s like Gordon Matta-Clark decided to dissect not buildings, but the very soul of domesticity. Chen forces us to confront what Martin Heidegger called “being-in-the-world”, but in a context where the “world” itself has become precarious, transient, elusive.
And guess what? He has the audacity to suspend a ruined house from a piece of driftwood. You don’t need to be Jacques Derrida to grasp the deconstruction at work here. It’s such a powerful image of our contemporary condition that it makes 90% of current conceptual art look like a first-year art school exercise.
Chen doesn’t just paint or install; he maps an emotional geography. His collages, with their cut-out windows and fragmented views, are not mere formal exercises. They embody what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”, where identities are made and unmade like waves on the Mulan River.
The way he uses found materials—newspapers, worn planks, abandoned objects—isn’t an artist’s whim to play scavenger. It’s an archaeology of the everyday that echoes Georges Bataille’s theories on the formless and base materialism. Every piece of rotting wood, every yellowed newspaper scrap is a witness to what we lose in our frantic race toward “progress”.
His work on family memory, particularly in his photographic series, isn’t a glorified family album. It’s an exploration of what Maurice Halbwachs called “collective memory”, seen through the lens of a modernity that fragments everything it touches. The family portraits folded into boat shapes in “Everyday Relationships” aren’t there to pull at your heartstrings. They speak of the fragility of social ties in a world where even the family has become a temporary construction.
For those who still think contemporary Chinese art is all stylized pandas and calligraphic characters, Chen Yujun is a necessary slap in the face. He shows us that cultural identity isn’t a costume you wear to openings, but a daily struggle between rooting and uprooting, between memory and forgetting.
And if you think I’m being too harsh, it’s because you haven’t yet understood that art isn’t here to lull you with sweet illusions. Chen Yujun is one of those rare artists who have the courage to show us our world as it is: a place where rivers forget but houses cannot. A world where every studio move—and he’s had twelve in twenty-three years—becomes a metaphor for our condition as permanent exiles.
His work is exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, M+ in Hong Kong, and in the world’s most prestigious contemporary art collections. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that he keeps digging, like a stubborn archaeologist, into the layers of our fractured present. He reminds us that art isn’t an investment for your portfolio, but a way of understanding who we are and what we are becoming in a world where even rivers have forgotten their names.
