SHI CHEN¹
时宸

Jan, 1997

China

Playing

Walking
Weaving
Wording

🎈

My mom’s mom always made winter clothes and little blankets for me, knitted covers for my thermos, even a sweater of my beloved yellow bear. My mom’s dad was always in his study, also taught me the calligraphy on the newspaper, and the way to make book covers. Meanwhile, my mother always organized documents into boxes and shelved them in the hospital, repeating writing down words on the paper near her hands when she spoke on the phone. These have shaped my attitudes and perspectives toward creative practice, and clearly influenced my choice of the medias and materials-daily life.

Starting from personal and familial experiences, I take Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life as my theoretical guide, focusing on everyday practices at specific sites and times. Also treating each work as a kind of play—both game and performance. Furthermore, each play corresponds to specific verbs, just like rules of a game or an actor’s script. Such as walking, weaving (textile), and wording (text).

By recognizing that limited materials can in fact engender unexpected freedoms, I pay close attention to—and make use of—the objects and materials that surround daily life, exploring the new experiences they afford. Depending on the specific locality and context, my practices unfold as a kind of nomadic or “nomadic play” creation. Like a child(or a baby raccoon) leaving home for the first time, I learn how to adapt and explore the creative possibilities that follow. Also, where and when to play are certainly important, but what seems even more important is how to play. I value the body’s unfiltered, spontaneous responses to materials, objects, and textures, as well as the sensory and emotional interactions between them, exploring the correlations between the body, material (object), and environment.

Finally, I take liminality and ambiguity as a defining feature of my work, while cherishing a certain betwixt and between feeling—one that haunts me almost constantly in everyday life, yet continues to fascinate me. For example, I explore the ambiguous boundaries and continuities between “everyday and non-everyday”, “planned and unplanned”, “stable and unstable” “freedom and constraint” “control and compliance”.

Experiences

Group Exhibition
2025 Telephone
2025 Dreamcore Space(Tian Xi House, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China)
2025 Interstitial Living(inBetween, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China)
2025 Found and Discovered International Group Exhibition(Loosen Art, Millepiani Rome)
2025 Scenes from Real Life International Group Exhibition(Loosen Art, Millepiani Rome)

Others
2024 Ki Hyongdo Literary Museum Poetry Contest 'One Blue Night' – Gold Prize(Korea)

1. "I took my mother's family name, 'Shi', which isn't very common. Also in Chinese, it means 'time'."
2. The charater “宸(Chen)” in Chinese both meaning the “big house” and “polar star”, home and cosmos are the two of the most significant issues in my life.
#home and cosmos #home as cosmos #cosmos as home