Chen Qiulin, b.1975, China

Chen Qiulin was born in China in 1975 and now lives and works in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. She graduated from the printmaking department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2000. As a young female artist from Sichuan province who has had a prolific and multifaceted career, Chen Qiulin stands out among the numerous Chinese artists, predominantly male, who work in the capital, Beijing, or in the metropolis of Shanghai.

Chen began her unofficial art education as a child when she accompanied her mother to work at a film company, there she watched science and education shorts and feature films, and painted film billboards. After graduating in 2000, she returned to the film company to paint billboards for another year and then moved to the city of Chengdu, where she encountered performance art for the first time. Chen has since created a unique fusion of installation, performance, photography, and video, producing works that address the rapid urbanization of China’s provincial areas and the toll that this is taking on society. Her work focuses on simultaneously capturing the nostalgia for how life used to be, the confusion brought on by the past pace of change, and the hope for a new and improved standard of living. Chen’s innate sense of performance returns with operatic scenes cast among shipping containers, outdoors in the evening, and along the river, contrasting the excitement of the up-and-coming new with a nostalgia for the traditional past.

The video work <Peach Blossom>featured in the exhibition are based on that Sichuan Province experienced the worst earthquake in its history in May 2008. Only 3 months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open, with China the focus of world attention, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes. The severe sense of loss reverberated with Chen, whose most recent body of work reflects on life in Sichuan after the disaster. Peach Blossom ( 桃花2009) was created with an archival instinct and a lens on the personal, social and environmental changes shaping people’s lives. In Chen’s words: “ We cannot avoid natural disasters – life goes on. I made videos and performed in the areas hit by the earthquake as a commemoration and hope that
more people will see how people are living in these areas and help them.”

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2009　Chen Qiulin, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA
　　　Chen Qiulin, Max Protetch, New York, USA
2007　Chen Qiulin: Recent Work, University Art Museum, State University of New York, USA
　　　Chen Qiulin, Max Protetch, New York, USA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2011　Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art – Moving Image in China (1988-2011), Minsheng Art
Museum, Shanghai
2010　A cross the Horizon–the Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art,The Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile
2008　The 7th Gwangju Biennale – Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, Gwangju, Korea