Yu Chen

Chinese-born and Philadelphia-educated, Yu Chen is a printmaker and illustrator with a deeply personal and surrealist approach. A thoroughly introspective person, Chen is confident and committed to exploring her own psyche through art. With works often surrealist in nature, her uncompromised technique lends a fine grace to each piece, blurring the lines between traditional and unconventional. The pieces function both as objects of sheer delicate beauty and unconscious mirrors to examine our own thoughts and feelings.

Certain images frequently bubble to the surface: young girls, animal specimens, ephemeral oddities. Despite her immaculate technique, the order of such images is not planned, nor are any overarching appeals. Each piece is a manifestation of old thoughts of witchcraft and childhood and botanical curiosities and the little trinkets at flea markets, a combination that does not feel any obligation to tell a specific story. The viewer reads their own meaning in between each fragile line of ink. Each piece contains a world constructed by Chen and lived by the viewer, immersed in both Chen’s and their own psychoanalytic dreamlands.