Chen Yingjie Turns He Art Museum into a Living Studio in Foshan
Chen Yingjie, also known as Hua Tunan, spent almost three months working inside He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, transforming the gallery from a place in which finished artworks are normally encountered into something far less predictable: an active studio in which painting, sound, movement, weather and experimentation could continue developing in public.
Titled 够姜 [gau3goeng1]: Chen Yingjie Studio Project, the residency opened on 23 June and ran until 15 September 2025. It was Chen’s first museum studio project and, rather than arriving with a completed body of work to install, he brought the process of making itself into the gallery. Painting, performance, interaction and sound were allowed to overlap within an open and continually evolving working environment, effectively turning the museum into studio, meeting place and experimental field.
For an artist whose recent practice has become increasingly concerned with what happens when complete control is surrendered, HEM provided a particularly appropriate setting. The project did not simply relocate Chen’s studio into a museum; it allowed the conditions of the museum itself to enter his thinking.
Chen Yingjie Studio Project at He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, 2025. Image copyright Chen Yingjie / HEM
About He Art Museum
Founded by the He family and opened in 2020, He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, is a family-established, non-profit private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art with an international outlook.
Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, the 16,000-square-metre museum is organised around a dramatic central atrium and exposed-concrete double-helix staircase, with light, water, geometry and movement forming an integral part of the architecture.
HEM’s programme brings Chinese modern and contemporary art into dialogue with international practices while maintaining a strong connection to the cultural life of Guangdong and the wider Lingnan region.
The entry of He Art Museum. By Iswzo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116658237
Letting the Space into the Work
Chen has spent recent years exploring landscapes in Yunnan and Tibet, where wind, altitude, changing light and unstable weather began influencing both his materials and his physical movement. At HEM, those questions continued within architecture rather than wilderness.
Through the museum’s floor-to-ceiling glass, Chen observed changes in light and shadow, while typhoons brought the physical vibration of thunder into the building. He introduced a go-kart into the gallery, allowing mechanical noise, movement and even the smell of petrol to become part of the sensory conditions surrounding the work.
Reflecting on those months, Chen explained that these experiences eventually found their way into what he was making, describing how light, thunder and mechanical sound had all entered the creative process.
It is an important distinction because Chen’s recent practice is increasingly less concerned with representing an environment than with allowing an environment to affect what a painting can become. The museum was therefore not simply a container for the work; it became one of the conditions through which the work developed.
Chen Yingjie Studio Project at He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, 2025. Image copyright Chen Yingjie / HEM
When Sound Begins to Paint
The residency culminated on 14 September with Sound-Painting Resonance, an improvised performance that pushed this idea further.
Chen worked in front of a specially tensioned canvas while low-frequency sound waves travelled through its surface. The canvas had been adjusted so that it retained a drum-like rebound while still allowing sprayed black pigment to move unpredictably across it; as vibration passed through the fabric and into the wooden floor of the gallery, paint flowed, dispersed and pooled according to forces Chen could initiate and influence without completely prescribing.
The experiment feels entirely consistent with the direction of his wider practice. In the mountains, wind and weather had interrupted the movement of pigment; in Shanghai, architecture had dictated the rhythm of his 30-metre staircase painting; at HEM, sound itself became physical, entering the painting through vibration.
What connects these projects is Chen’s willingness to establish conditions in which something beyond his own hand can participate in determining the result. Rather than diminishing authorship, that openness has become one of the most sophisticated aspects of his work, because technical mastery is used not to eliminate uncertainty but to recognise what uncertainty might offer.
Chen Yingjie Studio Project at He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, 2025. Image copyright Chen Yingjie / HEM
“Every Creation Is a New Test”
Chen’s own reflection on the project captures that attitude succinctly: “Every creation is a new test.”
The phrase is particularly revealing for an artist who could easily have continued refining the spectacular visual language that first established Hua Tunan internationally. Instead, Chen Yingjie increasingly appears interested in creating situations capable of showing him something he does not already know.
That makes 够姜 more than an artist residency. It becomes another stage in a practice steadily expanding the definition of what can participate in painting: the street offered speed and risk; the mountains introduced wind, altitude and weather; architecture altered bodily movement; and at He Art Museum, sound, vibration and the conditions of the gallery itself entered the experiment.
Seen in that context, HEM offered Chen something more valuable than simply another exhibition space. It gave him a place in which the artwork was allowed to remain unresolved long enough for something unexpected to happen. And for Chen Yingjie, increasingly, that appears to be exactly the point.
Chen Yingjie Studio Project at He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Foshan, 2025. Image copyright Chen Yingjie / HEM
Sources & Further Reading
He Art Museum / 够姜 [gau3goeng1]: Chen Yingjie Studio Project, 2025 Project documentation
Pearl River Business News / Shunde Library, 17 September 2025 Read the report
Chen Yingjie (Hua Tunan): Painting at the Edge of Control Read the GraffitiStreet feature
Chen Yingjie / Hua Tunan Transforms a Shanghai Staircase into a 30-Metre Live Painting Read the GraffitiStreet feature
Discover Hua Tunan at GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet has worked with Chen Yingjie, known artistically then as Hua Tunan since 2016, from Underground and our exclusive print collaborations to original studio works presented at our Chichester gallery.
Hua Tunan – Light Spreads Through Time (2024). Available via GraffitiStreet.
Explore Chen Yingjie / Hua Tunan at GraffitiStreet to discover available works including Light Spreads Through Time and limited editions such as Way of the Tiger and Fearless, or contact GraffitiStreet for acquisitions, sourcing, mural enquiries and private viewings.
Visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.