Chen Duxi Chinese, b. 1983

Chen Duxi (b. 1983, Chengdu) explores time, motion and objects through a synthesis of Western oil painting and traditional Chinese ink painting. 

Chen currently works and lives in Beijing. He graduated from the BFA program at Chengdu Academy of Fine Art in 2006. In 2008, he attended and completed an advanced course in oil painting from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Chen’s neo-traditionalist paintings can be best located in his ongoing engagement with lines and threads, which seek to express the subtle stability of qi and the concealed shi (momentum) that underlie the observable world. Though his works take classical elements of landscape and figures as stylistic references, Chen does not merely seek to revive antiquity. Rather, he grounds the act of painting in the artist’s embodied relationship with the natural world. 

In the sustained series 持頤 (chiyi, contemplate) and 尔躬（ergong), Chen combines the mundane and the lyrical, rendering scientific geological illustrations with  literati brushwork to surface with an empathic discernment that surfaces the lyrical vitality within nature. The striking details that emerge do not seek to affirm the positivist observations stemming from the human vision. Rather, the depiction of flora and fauna, water and clouds, and other organic matter are informed by Chen’s in-depth inquiries into their primordial existence prior to human civilization, as well as their time-honored presence as agential subjects.

Recent major exhibitions include: “Hydrology”, Anyone x Tea Here 798, Beijing, China, 2022;  “Emerging From The Twilight”, Salon Ten in WF Central, Beijing, China, 2021;  “Voice of the Spring”, Nouvel Institut Franco Chinois, Lyon, France, 2017;  “Two Sides of a Coin”, Gallery 55, Shanghai, China; “Thinking about Not Thinking”, Yishu 8, Beijing, China, 2016; “End of the Fall”, Solo show, Yishu 8, Beijing, China, 2015; “Confronting Anitya: Oriental Experience in Contemporary Art”, Yuan Art Museum, Beijing, China; The Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany, 2014; “Memorandum”, White Space Beijing, Beijing, China, 2013; “The Time Kept”, The Fringe Club, Hong Kong, China, 2010.