About Li Chen

Li Chen is a Chinese artist based between London and Ningbo. She gained her BA in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art before completing an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2020. Chen has participated in group exhibitions internationally, and was awarded the Aon Community Art Award in 2018. Through her practice, she engages in a dialogue around eastern aesthetics and western philosophy, conceptualising this contradiction using Asian lacquer craft and mineral pigment painting to construct contemporary works that toy with traditional western modes.

Chen’s practice is preoccupied with the often-mysterious nature of eastern aesthetics, and the irrational aspects of social life under the modernisation process. The artist interrogates the clashes between mysticism and modernity, and between reason and intuition in contemporary society to understand how these transfer into an “aesthetic of contradictions”. The binaries explored by Chen are connected, in part, to Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as well as Zen Buddhist awareness of contingency and impermanence. The artist uses these schools of thought as a tipping off point through which to create what she terms “an iridescent hologram and dark labyrinth, an outburst in restraint, a blizzard in the silence, and a mirage of caprice.”