Lynn Hai

Chen Dongfan: The Omnipresence of Myth

Text / Liang Hai

ArtPulse Issue No. 34

In ancient times, myths were legendary stories steeped in tradition and came with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation. They are concerned with non-human beings and explain some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature. Some myths are melodramatic and distorted records or interpretations of public memories, somehow reflecting a public awareness of explaining and propagating ideas on events or phenomena. Today’s writers and artists don't usually attempt to create new myths; but due to myths’ classical and enduring nature, contemporary literature and art often leverage them to generate modern content. Their plots are often cited, retold, and elaborated on. They are used for symbolic concepts, inspirations for new storylines, or their mythological characters are repurposed to generate characters anew. Chen Dongfan, a contemporary artist active in both China and New York, incorporates mythic elements in his abstract-impacted expressionistic oil paintings and discovers their new meanings in contemporary life in response to current events and topical opinions.

Ever since COVID-19 attacked the world and developed into a pandemic in early 2020, people have to start quarantine and attempt to reduce contact with the outside. Chen Dongfan’s new oil painting series Story and Poster are created under this global change in which everyone has to adapt their way of living to new social rules. He stopped the everyday commute between his apartment and his studio, moved back home, and started these small-size paintings on his desk. Chen normally seeks inspiration from a variety of resources such as music, visual art, movies or even friend’s opinions. He is keen on extracting interesting fragments from his daily browse to distort, fuse and sublimate them in order to create his own art. Since the pandemic and self-quarantine began, his access to the abundant outside information has been considerably diminished due to the reduction of communication. As a result, he has turned to online resources and allocated more time to read literature. Due to these changes, a focus on how fictions, myths, and stories are formulated through time has therefore heavily influenced his thinking process in generating new works.

The Story series is oil drawings on Chinese rice paper, in the size similar to that of a book, with a form that reminds viewers of a diptych. Chen Dongfan starts each painting from a line of literary text, which seems to indicate a dramatic scene or an intricate story on the first piece of rice paper. He then frees his imagination, searching for mythic elements and begins to create characters and weave plots in his mind. He immerses himself into this world of fantasy until he reaches some spiritual state that is beyond the mundane. As the boundaries of his imagination expand, he abstractly captures his impressions in the fantasy realm and visualizes them on the second piece of paper. There is always an eccentric figure in the image presented as an important character or narrator of the story. To finish he turns back to the first piece of paper with the text and continues his painting over the text. This gives his visual fiction an ending that echoes the beginning. Thus, his Story series implies a timeline of narration, presenting not as a frozen moment of the climax of a tale, but rather the whole process of how a story develops and transforms.

The Poster series is more straightforward in storytelling than his Story series. This series is drawn on Chinese rice paper and plastic packaging paper, crumpled and flattened after the oil paint is dry, thus appearing in a wrinkled texture. The Poster series are direct records of Chen Dongfan’s struggles and confusions while quarantined at home, making manifestos about suffering and adapting to this traumatic and bewildering time. Although this perspective is expressed through intense colors and distorted figures of the artist’s individual and subjective emotional experience, it can easily evoke memories of quarantine time that resonates with the public. Chen’s previous series of works, especially his large-scale paintings and installation works, were palpably influenced by Abstract Expressionism on techniques. However, his two most recent series both turned from abstract strokes to more figural images.

The fairly representational depiction of themes in the Story and Poster series also reveals a great extent of poetry and literariness in both the process of creation and the consequence of drawing. Compared to Chen’s past works, the visual language in these two series reflects less homogeneity and more directivity. This resembles the literary language of a novel through special linguistic and formal properties, being reasonably detailed to express a story concisely. Although Chen Dongfan has absorbed and adopted many mythological elements, he never aims to paint his figures and objects at the level of symbolism. So while familiar elements that convey specific emotions may be present, it is not possible to find any image of known mythic characters in his paintings. For example, The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes in the Story series depicts a distorted monstrous creature with elongated arms and legs that seemingly recalls a memory of some demon that hides in the dark and can change its body shape easily. It is the coexistence of ambiguity and directivity that leads us to ponder on both collective emotions and individual experiences while looking at Chen’s works. The true meaning of a myth is actually far beyond its dramatic story, but rather arousing the awareness of critical thinking, or reaching a state of spiritual understanding of the world. Chen always pursues this mental state beyond the concrete in his creation.

On the one hand, Chen Dongfan is voracious in obtaining information to be inspired; on the other, he is also enthusiastic in exploring different forms and mediums of his creation. In the realm of traditional painting, his works include small-size pieces produced on a desk, large-size stretched canvases, and enormous murals on building facades. Aside from these, Chen Dongfan has also often taken spaces including libraries, second-hand bookstores and film festivals as platforms for his practice. He has employed a combination of expanded painting, music, dance, performance and other mediums to achieve his unique visual language harmonizing narrative and poeticism, figuration and abstraction, the collective and the individual. 

A profound influence of spiritual transcendence on Chen Dongfan is from his best friend and mentor Candida Höfer, a prominent German born photographer. She is known for her meticulously composed, large-scale color images of architectural interiors. Höfer, being interested in the psychological and spiritual impact of design, has focused her lens on cultural buildings whilst devoid of people. The large-scale nature of the work invites the viewer to linger over the delicate details of the space and contemplate the subtle shifts in light. Although Chen’s background and art practice are tremendously different from Höfer, the pursuit to a higher spiritual state from everyday experience is their common ground in career. Chen is deeply obsessed with the realm of divinity and thus attempts to create his own path through his styles and practices while Höfer discovers hers from public places.

Candida Höfer’s works have also directly encouraged Chen’s interest in creating spatial art to immerse the viewer with overwhelming visuals in space. In his project The Song of Dragon and Flowers, a large-scale public art project at New York Chinatown in 2018, Chen painted a mural directly on the 4800 square foot asphalt of Doyers Street. This project is also a representative case of how Chen recapitulated a traditional mythic theme under the contemporary context. To highlight the historical significance of Chinatown in the immigration history of the Asian American community, Chen selected the image of dragon - a most typical symbol of auspice in traditional Chinese myths - as the main theme of his creation in this project. During the eight days Chen painted the street, various stories transpired at this temporary public playground: staff travelled a dramatically long way to deliver devices and materials; the plan of using a drone to take photos became problematic; an opponent splashed ink on the painting at night, and Chen continued painting the next day and cleverly incorporated the ink mark in the picture. After this massive undertaking was finished, the abstract depiction of the dragon's mythic figure amazed every visitor passing through with vivid colors and energetic forms. A new “myth” was created and has become a part of the public memory in this neighborhood.

Myth for Chen Dongfan is his indelible childhood memory and the beginning of a way he recognizes the world. Chen, while being conscious of what he attempts to achieve in every painting, often resorts to non-realistic elements for inspiration or as subjects because they may possess the most direct characteristics to his concepts. The linear thinking process he applies to create a painting is to some extent similar to writing a literary story: planning, sketching, revising, repressing, or reconfiguring. Chen’s oscillation between abstract and non-abstract does not destabilize the persistence of his works since the unaltered motif that drives his creation is the narration of his cognition of the world. Through myths and reinterpreted myths, Chen seeks for collective memories and public resonances of the human mind throughout history, which are still sobering and practical in our contemporary world.