Chen Li - CRAG

BIOGRAPHY
WORKS
EXHIBITIONS

Biography

CHEN LI (Beijing, 1988)

Chen Li graduated at the Fine Arts Academy of Rome in 2012. She now lives and works in Turin.

Chen’s paintings represent mainly floral abstract compositions developing though into faces, animals and informal shapes, using the colors in a very original way. The recurring tones of green and orange make the subjects almost suspended in a floating and mysterious dimension, which transports the viewers into the artist’s universe. The influence of the Chinese tradition is evident, but the artist is able to re-elaborate it with a sense of contemporaneity and originality, involving us in her intimate world, that could even become our.

“Chen Li lives in a colorful darkness, never melancholic, noisy and vital- istic, a painting of errors and perfection at the same time. Everything competes, harmoniously, in the intricate tangle of signs and layers, free brushstrokes and marks created with “defective” brushes whose normal fate would be to be discarded. Like spontaneous suggestions, instead of taking their lives, Chen Li uses them to add additional layers, details, filaments resembling twigs or traces. She covers and then uncovers, perhaps just as she does with her own feelings. What is never given a priori, that kaleidoscope of forms that appear spontaneous and then, in the shock of seeing them emerge, are erased and covered with new ones destined for the same fate. Something new always arises in her painting process, just as in our way of seeing her paintings” (Lucrezia Nardi)