TRANSPARENT AQUEOUS WORLD
by Chen Haiyan

Chen Yun, a baby floating in a phantom world, is clean and pure. If you stare at her works, her image will gradually merge out. In another word, her works are exactly the same as her person.

In this series, traces of her previous stylistic digital touch could be detected. Obviously, she is seeking for a gradual breakthrough, giving up her most favorite mouse, painting with the most traditional materials, water color and paper, and thinking not in front of a computer screen. Without comparison, viewers may not find the reason of the change. But I assume that she would like to use a new carrier to render her imagination. It is the hand painting that is direct, emotional and at ease. I cannot estimate what is on her mind, but when looking repeatedly through her fantastic world of colors and forms, what conjures up in my mind is a pleasant melody of a transparent world played by water.

The transparency is the waving shadow of the past times. It remains its sun light clarity in the phantom like super reality. She cannot help but gradually start to become solemn which is manipulated with, instead of heavy colors and strokes, light and soft gradations of wash, a force that subsumes the unbearable heaviness of life. She loves the pupils that show the spiritual passages and the crystal balls that reflect reality and dream and truth and fantasy, as if she loves all the good and the evil in the world. In a kind of seemingly illogic and irrational ration, she exaggerates and distorts the truth that she analyzes.

All over the works, are paradoxical holes which might be bloody apples, cold lips, symbols burst by human figures, windows broken by peach branches and also melancholy eyes … Holes are everywhere. They are scars of our wandering spirit. No matter how we make up our bodies, the wound is still inevitable. At this moment, she looks like a little green worm hidden in a red apple, momentarily popping her head out through the hole that she has gnawed, looking at the outside world, breathing the fresh air and then disappearing in seclusion.

This gifted talent bears a natural expression which is not duplicable and not estimable. Even those she thinks finished pieces make you expect more, just like a riddle when ended the excitement of deciphering would still haunt you. This free and unrestrained logic is her mark stroked by her brush with water and color and is also her fantasy painted by the skillful hand of a Chinese beauty, wonderful and yet desolate. 

In my impression her works are fragmented realistic, hard to describe in an academic term. Without giving a title or evaluation might be a kind of respect and protection for the young artists. Just like now in the beautiful melody, my eyes follow her paintings into her two-headed typical geminorum phantom world. I find her mysterious Sphinx smile.