Yanyun Chen

Yanyun Chen (Chinese: 陈彦云; pinyin: Chén Yànyún; born 1986) is a Singaporean artist who works with charcoal drawings, animation and installation. Her works feature intergenerational family stories and cultural wounds, which explore tenuous relationships with traditions and scars that live in language.

Early life and education
Chen was born in Singapore. She attended Nanyang Technological University and received a BFA (first class honours) in Digital Animation in 2009. Following that, she completed a MA in Communications in 2012 and Phd in Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory in 2018 at European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Career
Chen taught at Yale-NUS College from 2015-2022. At the College, she received the Georgette Chen Fellowship in 2020. In 2021, she received the Andreas Teoh Contemporary Asian Art Program Fellowship. She held the role of Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Tufts University, in Boston, USA since 2023.

The scars that write us
Commissioned and mentored by Singapore Art Museum for the President's Young Talent 2018,The scars that write us is a series of scar portraits welded and drawn on mild steel. The exhibition adopts the keloid scar as its reference and offers a narrative on wounds and scars, and those that bear them. In an interview with art writer Ian Tee, he shares that "Chen speaks of "the scars that live in language", texturing the physical-psychological wounds on skin with trauma inflicted by a welding gun."

Stories of a Woman and her Dowry
Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry was the first solo exhibition at Grey Projects in 2019 after Chen's successful outing at the Singapore Art Museum's President's Young Talents (PYT) showcase. It highlights the signature narrativity of her installations.

The epilogue of the exhibition "Stories of a Woman and her Dowry - Three Dawns" was exhibited at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film in 2022. Curator Kimberley Shen describes "navigate the precarities of the cultural tropes and expectations of Asian women, in a palpable reclamation of tenderness and strength embedded in the feminine narrative and identity". Chen shares that stories derived from intergenerational trauma can just as much be an intergenerational gift, "It’s the gift of independence, the gift of courage, the gift of being able to express when they can’t express or they didn’t have the opportunity or the choice to."

Awards
Chen was awarded the People's Choice Award at the President's Young Talents award for her work, The scars that write us, presented at Singapore Art Museum in 2018. Chen was awarded the Art Outreach IMPART Award in 2019. She was awarded Best Art Direction at National Youth Film Awards for stop-motion short film "Automatonomy", directed by Mark Wee and Jerold Chong of Finding Pictures.

In 2020, Chen was awarded the National Arts Council Singapore Young Artist Award, Singapore's highest award for young arts practitioners, aged 35 and below.