EXHIBITION DETAILS
Nomadic Echoes
Artist: Chen Chenbaoyun
Duration: 20 June–20 August 2026
Curator: Shen Shufan
Producer: Guo Jianguang
Organisers:
Vanke Hangzhou
Xima Gallery
Guiding Organisations:
Qianjiang Century City Administrative Committee
Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism, and Sports Bureau of Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou
Yingfeng Subdistrict Office, Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou
Address:
LIAN Gallery, 5F, Xiwenleji, Building 6, Riyao City, Asian Games Village, Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou
Outside the studio in Normandy, beyond the walnut tree is a cowshed; to the right, a paddock. Past the small white apricot and apple trees, beyond the low shrubs, stands a deckchair, and further on, the woods. Each day, after putting away her materials, she walks back and forth along this route. Her footsteps fall on the earth and on the canvas. The cycle has no destination, only rhythm — tap, tap, tap — like a heartbeat, like a brushstroke, like the way a nomad stays connected to the world.
From 2022 to 2026: four years. She made Twenty-Twenty: The Answer, Footsteps: Calendar, A Way Out and Longing; clothing and accessories in collaboration with Rickyoung; and digital transformations of the Perpetual-Motion Figure Painting Series. Yet the most important work she made was herself: a person moving back and forth between East and West, between tradition and the contemporary, between commerce and fine art, and between ‘I must find the answer’ and ‘the answer will arrive of its own accord’.
Perhaps the identity of which she is most proud is simply that of the person walking back and forth beneath the walnut tree in Normandy.
This walking is nomadism: from Qingdao to Paris, from Paris to Normandy, from Normandy back to Shanghai, and then onwards again. It is the cowshed and paddock beneath the walnut trees; the deckchair beyond the small white apricot and apple trees; the moment when her friends’ footprints stepped onto the canvas. Within the cycle of footsteps, answers and ways out, she repeatedly turns inward and repeatedly opens outward.
It is also an echo: the sea wind of Normandy carries her voice away, and somewhere in the world — a Paris salon, an old Shanghai lane, the Northern Grottoes of Gansu — it returns to her in another form. It is the spirit carried by red, black and gold: from three, the myriad things are born; vitality moves without end. It is the flowing, never-repeating brushwork within the NFTs, stubbornly retaining the warmth of the hand in an age of the ‘decay of aura’ described by Walter Benjamin.
Now, you are invited to enter the exhibition. Like her, walk back and forth. Perhaps the answer will find you along the way; perhaps you will find only another question; perhaps what you find is yourself.
Prelude: Parisian Living Rooms — The Spirit of Red, Black and Gold
At the end of 2023, after completing a two-person exhibition in Qingdao, Chen Chenbaoyun returned to Paris. The Red, Black and Gold series began to enter the homes of international collectors. Different walls — their light, scale and colour — brought with them the stories behind those walls: stories of family, memory, and lives that wished to be accompanied by a painting.
Red is vitality and sincerity. Black is depth, the structural bone of Eastern ink painting. Gold is radiance, the ever-moving energy from which the myriad things emerge. With these three colours, she disrupted the established chromatic order and created a visual language of her own.
Through these conversations she found recognition and gratitude. In an unguarded moment, she also touched the void left by her father’s death — a void she had never truly confronted.
Transition: Time in Normandy — Footsteps and Answers
She then arrived in Normandy.
The 20 × 20 cm Twenty-Twenty series suddenly began to appear in gold. As she became familiar with her new surroundings, she painted slowly — surrounded by the light of Normandy, the smell of earth and plants, and the footprints left on the canvases by friends who came from Paris to visit her.
One day, the lead singer of La Femme stepped onto one of the squares she was painting, leaving a trace of earth on the canvas. In that instant she saw that every day spent walking back and forth, the friends who travelled back and forth to see her, and she herself were all ways out.
This is how A Way Out came into being.
Chorus: Lane · Calendar — Echoes of Memory
In 2024, the sixtieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and France, she returned to Shanghai with Footsteps: Calendar.
The traditional Chinese almanac — an element of everyday life — was superimposed with the image of the artist herself seated on the floor, painting. When the brush carried her into a state of flow, she would occasionally experience a sense of overlapping time and space.
The media described the work through the theme of ‘China–France exchange’, but she herself had not thought about it in such terms. She simply responded to each arriving impulse with directness and sincerity.
Completed in 2024, the moving-image work Lane · Calendar records the everyday sounds of Shanghai that are gradually disappearing: street vendors’ calls, bicycle bells, and Yue opera playing on the radio. These sounds had once belonged to her childhood. Later she carried them to Paris, where they echoed repeatedly in the sea wind of Normandy; finally, they returned with her.
Then there is Longing.
Within the red, black and gold visual language, the moon appears. A girl dressed in hanfu holds the lamp of longing; its wick, shaped like the Eiffel Tower, glows with a foreign light. The real and the imagined, homeland and a place away from home, meet within the work. Mid-Autumn moonlight falls on the soil of Normandy and on the lanes of Shanghai.
