Yi Cynthia Chen: Between Surface and Soil by FLOHAUS Gallery on Artsy
When you look at Yi Cynthia Chen’s work, you encounter bodies, plants, and fragments of built environments woven into shifting landscapes. Figures open into root systems, and architecture dissolves into organic forms, as everything seems in the process of becoming. Chen is an interdisciplinary painter whose practice explores the interconnected cycles of nature, the body, and history, layering spaces where perception, memory, and habitat continuously reshape one another.
Yi Cynthia Chen develops her practice through the intersection of Chinese Hakka heritage and American cultural contexts, drawing from histories shaped by migration, land cultivation, and adaptation. These influences inform how she approaches both material and subject, where relationships to land are inherited.
Her paintings evolve through a process of accumulation. Images are built gradually, with each gesture responding to what is already present, allowing the composition to remain open and responsive.
Across her work, the body is consistently reconfigured as a site of exchange rather than containment. Biological processes, spatial ambiguities, and built structures, intersect within the same visual field, dissolving clear distinctions between internal and external conditions. Elements such as water, roots, and infrastructure recur as connective tissue, suggesting continuous circulation between perception, memory, and terrain.
At the same time, Chen’s work is organized through tension. Organic references appear alongside industrial supports, while personal and geographic memory is held within constructed frameworks. Growth emerges as something active and often disruptive, pushing through existing systems rather than settling within them. These relationships remain unresolved, where stability and transformation coexist, and where both cultural and environmental conditions are continuously in flux.
In Chen’s paintings, stories unfold through details. Moving closer, you begin to notice roots pushing through forms, and images slipping between what feels real and imagined. Nothing settles into a single narrative, each element carries its own tension. Painting becomes a way of staying with these contradictions, allowing different forces to exist at once. Within this shifting state, something takes shape that feels close to an internal weather.
