Biography
Yuanjie Chen (b. 1999. Fuzhou) is a multidisciplinary artist from China based in New York City. Yuanjie's works are mainly paintings and installations that explore the definition of warmth and love and share his emotional journey, which transited from a deep discussion of his original family's problems and Chinese culture in his art practice in various materials. The shift comes from his incessant self-introspection. It gives him insight into how symbolism conveys his concept to his audience and the connection between red color and emotion. He finished his MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts.
Statement
My practice examines how emotion, memory, intimacy, and inherited structures are registered through the body. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, I use the body not simply as a subject, but as a site where psychological, cultural, and material forces become visible.
Material plays a central role in this process. I frequently work with red wax, artificial blood, cement, wood, fabric, and reflective or pearlescent surfaces. These materials carry both physical and symbolic tensions: cement suggests weight, structure, and containment, while wax can melt, harden, stain, and preserve traces of contact. Red moves between associations with blood, warmth, intimacy, danger, and the auspicious meanings it carries within Chinese culture. Rather than using these materials as fixed symbols, I am interested in how their behavior can produce unstable relationships between flesh and architecture, vulnerability and support, rupture and repair.
Earlier works focused more directly on the pressures surrounding the body: family structures, emotional sacrifice, attachment, and forms of containment. Over time, my work has shifted from asking what acts upon the body to asking how the body itself processes experience. This transition has led me toward questions of sensation, attention, and perception.
In my recent work, the body becomes a perceptual system through which memory and emotion are continuously reorganized. Painting and sculpture increasingly operate together, allowing anatomical forms, surfaces, and spatial structures to function less as representations of the body than as diagrams of sensing, remembering, and orienting oneself in the world.