"We must be in awe of Nature."
– Chen Yingjie
Danysz Gallery-Shanghai is pleased to celebrate The Year of the Tiger with a new solo exhibition by Chen Yingjie aka Hua Tunan! As the world is entering the Tiger Year according to Chinese zodiac, Chen Yingjie is confronting himself to the symbolism of the traditional celebration, offering a vibrant and energetic tribute to this sign.
The works presented follow the daoism component of Chen Yingjie's paintings and unleash the tiger in our hearts. The artist indeed believes that there is a tiger in everyone's minds: vivid, majestic and powerful but also brave and fearless. It is up to us to boldly release it as a strength and wisdom of life.
In the past, the tiger in Chen's paintings was used to represent anger, but through time it gradually came to express a catharsis for the complex emotions in our hearts, as well as the chasing of dreams as conveyed by the animal’s strength and beauty. For the artist: “we need to overcome the challenges in our journey and trust our instinct. We will grow through struggles, find strength in defiance and courage in fear."
Taking “hunger” as the core idea to depict portraits of animals, Chen Yingjie has been developing a series of paintings entitled “Stay Hungry”: diary-like artworks based on the artist’s own experiences, aiming at observing the delicate emotions, life stories and life journey. The “hunger” also contains different creative states and experiences, and has gradually become a driving force to encourage exploration and innovation in a diversified era.
The tiger has actually always been an important figure to paint for Chen Yingjie. This fascination aroused when the artist joined the WWF（World Widelife Fund) to take part in initiatives to study and protect wild tigers in the forests of Cambodia. It led the artist to create a series of works on this specific subject in response to global environmental issues that enabled him to push further the limits of his painting talent.
Chen Yingjie (aka. Hua Tunan) was born in 1991 in Guangdong, China. He studied at Raffles Design Institute in Singapore. In addition to working on canvas, the artist also devotes himself to large-scale mural paintings, live performances, and space devices. Through different media, he has been exploring how to combine traditional Chinese ink painting with Western street art graffiti, striving to find a balance between the two cultures, and ultimately breaking away from cultural constraints to establish his own artistic language. His work has been presented in major institutions in China and around the world, among which Tank and Power Station of Art in Shanghai, CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, or the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. He has collaborated with many international brands like Cartier, Volkswagen, Louis Vuitton, Adidas or Volvo. In 2020, he was named by Forbes one of China”s “30 Under 30”. His work is present in many world-class private and public collections, including Honolulu Museum of Art, BMW China Automotive or CapitaLand Group. He lives and works in Shunde Foshan.
