Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: here’s someone who didn’t get lost in the maze of art schools where they teach you to paint like everyone else. Ouyang Chun, born in 1974 in Beijing, is the story of an exile who built himself up alone, like those plants that grow in the cracks of concrete. Sent to Xi’an during his childhood, he turned that marginality into his creative strength. Walter Benjamin spoke of the ragpickers of Paris—those collectors of abandoned objects who revealed the unconscious of the city. Ouyang is our contemporary ragpicker of Xi’an, our archaeologist of the present, who transforms 12 tons of waste into visual poetry.
You who think art must emerge from air-conditioned studios in Shanghai’s trendy districts, look at what he does with the detritus of Chinese society. He doesn’t just recycle—he resurrects. Rusty beds become totems, abandoned thermoses metamorphose into precious relics. It’s Schwitters meets the Buddhist philosophy of Wu Wei—the art of letting things be. There’s something deeply subversive in his way of celebrating these fallen objects, these traces of a China vanishing before our eyes.
What fascinates me about him is his stubborn refusal to play the game of the contemporary Chinese art market. There’s no calculated cynicism here, none of those easy winks to the West that so many Chinese artists serve up like reheated leftovers. No, Ouyang digs deeper. He dialogues with Constantin Brâncuși and Sarah Lucas while remaining viscerally anchored in the Chinese experience. When he transforms an overturned medical basin into a royal head in King and Queen No.2, it’s Marcel Duchamp meets Tang sculptures, and the result is electrifying.
Speaking of kings, his King cycle is a masterful slap to all those who think contemporary painting must be “proper”. Thirty monumental canvases, some over 5 meters high, where he reinvents history with a joyous freedom that would make the guardians of the academic temple howl. The wild impasto of his paint, the gold leaf that erupts like lightning in the pictorial matter—it’s Anselm Kiefer on LSD with the monks of the Dunhuang caves.
Curator Margrit Brehm is right when she says it’s impossible to categorize him. In a Chinese art scene long dominated by Political Pop and Cynical Realism, Ouyang is an outsider who refuses labels. He reminds me of what Theodor Adorno said about the necessity of art to resist “false totality”—the temptation to harmonize everything, to make it all palatable.
His latest project, Road to Heaven, inspired by the Zhongnan mountains, proves he keeps evolving. Gone are the expressionist explosions of his early work, replaced by an almost meditative contemplation of nature. But don’t be fooled—even in these seemingly calmer landscapes, there’s a radicality that defies expectations. He paints as if each brushstroke were a battle between natural order and creative chaos.
Ouyang Chun turns marginality into creative strength. As Bell Hooks theorized, the margin is not just a place of oppression; it’s also a space of radical resistance. Ouyang, with his atypical self-taught journey, embodies that resistance. In a Chinese art system where the academic network reigns supreme, he has created his own language, his own mythology.
I think back to his installation Thousands of Songs—a circle of enamel pots and bowls arranged around a table covered with a dirty tablecloth. It’s a work that speaks of collective memory, displacement, exile. It reminds me of what Susan Sontag said about art’s ability to make us feel the pain of others. But Ouyang goes further—he transforms that pain into a kind of paradoxical celebration, a memorial that dances on the ruins.
His work is a lesson for all those artists who confuse provocation with depth. He shows us that you can be radical without being cynical, political without being didactic. In our world, which is mostly obsessed with the spectacular, he dares to trust slowness, accumulation, the patient transformation of abandoned things.
So yes, some will say he’s too raw, too unpolished for their sanitized galleries. But that’s precisely what we need today—artists who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, who understand that art isn’t about technical perfection but inner necessity, as Kandinsky put it. Ouyang Chun is one of them, and that’s why he matters.