Chen Yingjie (Hua Tunan) in His Own Words: Art, Intuition and Letting Go
For an artist whose work first became internationally recognisable through explosive colour, monumental animals and the collision of Chinese ink painting with graffiti, Chen Yingjie, also known as Hua Tunan, speaks remarkably little about spectacle. Instead, when Chen discusses his practice, he returns to intuition, bodily perception, uncertainty, nature and an increasingly complex relationship with control.
Read individually, his statements are revealing; read together, they begin to describe an artistic philosophy. Chen is interested in what happens when knowledge becomes instinct, when technique becomes sufficiently secure to accommodate accident and when the artist stops regarding the world outside the studio as something merely to represent. Wind, light, altitude, speed, sound and even failure become capable of altering what a painting might become.
Perhaps most importantly, his words reveal an artist who appears increasingly willing to question the very language that first made him known.
Chen Yingjie creating his 30-metre live painting across the staircase at Taikoo Li Qiantan, Shanghai, where architecture, movement and improvised sound became part of the work. Read the full GraffitiStreet feature
“Whether It Is Chinese Painting or Graffiti Is No Longer Important”
Chen’s early biography is often presented through a convenient opposition: traditional Chinese ink painting inherited through his childhood on one side, Western graffiti discovered later on the other. His own thinking has moved considerably beyond that division.
Reflecting on the development of his practice in 2024, Chen explained that the distinction had become almost irrelevant: “Whether it is Chinese painting or graffiti is no longer important to me.” He continued that he no longer needed consciously to preserve or reject either tradition because, whatever choice he made, both would remain present within him. ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
The statement is important because it changes how the work should be understood. Chinese ink and graffiti are not competing visual references that Chen repeatedly has to reconcile; they have been absorbed deeply enough to function almost unconsciously. As he told SuperELLE, “the rebellious spirit of artistic creation and the genes of ink painting have long flowed through my body like blood; whenever I pick up a brush, they grow naturally.” SuperELLE, 2024
What remains, once those labels cease to dominate, is the question of what the artist actually wants the painting to carry. For Chen, that increasingly appears to be energy.
Chen Yingjie with a work from Shaping the Essence, Danysz Gallery, Shanghai, where Chinese ink, graffiti and ideas of Yin and Yang meet within a visual language increasingly his own. Explore Chen Yingjie’s evolving practice
“I Was Not Simply Depicting a Mountain”
The landscapes that have come to occupy Chen’s mature practice are not straightforward attempts to reproduce mountains, glaciers or rivers. During his journeys through Tibet and Yunnan, he began to understand that the visible landscape was only one part of what he was responding to.
Looking back at this development, he explained: “I realised that I was not simply depicting a mountain; I was painting an energy.” ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
The distinction goes some way towards explaining why his later landscapes increasingly approach abstraction. Light moves rapidly across snow and rock, temperatures collapse, clouds obscure and reveal forms, and a recognisable mountain can change perceptually within minutes. Chen describes those transitions between light and shadow as instrumental in pushing his paintings between figuration and abstraction.
Landscape therefore becomes less a fixed object than a concentration of forces. This also explains one of his simplest statements about art: “The best work is nature.” Studio Visits: Chen Yingjie, Hypebeast, 2022
For Chen, nature is increasingly not something waiting politely to be painted. It is capable of participating.
Chen Yingjie in the snowy mountains of Yunnan, where landscape, weather and altitude began to move from subject matter into active forces within the work for Danysz Gallery, Paris. Read more about Chen Yingjie’s evolving relationship with nature
“I Want to Convey the Importance of Intuition in Painting”
Chen titled his 2024 Long Museum exhibition Intuitive Wanderings, and his explanation of the phrase offers another important route into the work: “I want to convey the importance of intuition in painting, a phenomenon close to a signal yet beyond information.” SuperELLE, 2024
Intuition, as Chen describes it, is not simply spontaneity. It emerges through accumulated experience until conscious calculation is no longer required for every decision, allowing sensation, memory and bodily knowledge to operate simultaneously.
This is why an artist famous for speed also talks about slowing down. Discussing inspiration, Chen observed that “first, you have to slow down, then perceive, and inspiration will come,” before adding that “inspiration may have many answers, but they all come from life.” The Paper, 2022
The apparent contradiction between speed and slowness is central to his practice. A sprayed gesture might happen in seconds, yet the sensitivity required to recognise precisely when and how to make it has taken years to develop. What looks instantaneous is supported by a much longer accumulation of looking, travelling, painting and repeating.
Chen Yingjie during his 2025 studio project at He Art Museum in Foshan, where painting became an open experiment shaped by intuition, sound, architecture and changing conditions. Read the HEM feature
“I Create with My Body”
The physical scale of Chen’s work has always been striking, yet he does not understand large painting primarily as a problem of size. When asked how he controls monumental compositions without extensive preparatory drawings, Chen answered: “I create with my body, not simply through the movement of my arm.” ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
Elsewhere he has described something similar in more poetic terms, explaining that “during travelling and painting, the body is like a conductor,” through which experiences and changes in emotion become fuel for creation. SuperELLE, 2024
His interest in motor racing makes more sense within this context. Chen has spoken about finding the exact threshold between acceleration, braking and losing control on a track, where the body responds to tiny signals from the vehicle and road before there is time for prolonged conscious analysis. He has even connected the sensation of crashing, when time appeared momentarily to slow, with experiences he later carried into painting. ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
Painting, landscape and racing may appear to belong to entirely different worlds, yet Chen encounters each through the same instrument: the body.
Chen Yingjie working on Natural Gravity 41 / GRAVITY XLI in Shanghai, where bodily movement, architecture and the surrounding environment became inseparable from the mural. Read the GraffitiStreet story
“Accept Everything Uncontrollable”
Perhaps no statement captures Chen’s recent practice more precisely than his answer when Hypebeast asked what sits at the centre of his artistic system: “Accept everything uncontrollable, because that is the most interesting and challenging part of creation.” Studio Visits: Chen Yingjie, Hypebeast, 2022
The principle has become increasingly literal. Outdoors, wind interferes with aerosol before it reaches the canvas; ultraviolet light alters drying times; snow, sand, stone and ice leave their own traces, while altitude changes the physical condition of the artist himself.
Chen describes the wind as an “invisible hand” entering the painting, not equivalent to mechanically directing air with a fan because its changes belong to a wider natural environment that he cannot fully anticipate. ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
This willingness to accommodate uncertainty should not be confused with relinquishing discipline. Chen remains the person choosing the location, materials, scale and conditions, but he increasingly allows another force to complete part of the sentence. That is a subtle but important shift in authorship.
Chen Yingjie in his studio, where years of physical repetition allow conscious technique to move increasingly towards instinct and intuition. Read our in-depth Chen Yingjie artist feature
“At That Moment, I Let Go of My Attachment to Painting”
One of the most revealing moments in Chen’s recent interviews concerns an experience in Tibet when extreme wind suddenly swept away his canvas and equipment.
For an artist who had spent considerable time planning an expedition and carrying materials into a remote landscape, the obvious response might have been frustration. Instead, Chen describes something approaching release: “At that moment, I let go of my attachment to painting.” ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
The experience made him question whether preparation itself could become excessive, particularly when the artist’s desire to produce begins to overpower the encounter that originally inspired the work. His conclusion goes considerably further than simply embracing accident: “This journey made me realise that sometimes perhaps not even one painting needs to be made.” ArtAlpha / LONG Museum interview, 2024
It is difficult to imagine a statement further removed from the expectation that a successful artist should continually manufacture recognisable objects. For Chen, not painting can itself become evidence that something has been understood.
Chen Yingjie working inside He Art Museum during 够姜 [gau3goeng1], his first museum studio project and a further exploration of what can happen when control is deliberately left incomplete. Read the HEM feature
“Think Big, Do Small”
GraffitiStreet encountered another side of this philosophy through Natural Gravity 41 / GRAVITY XLI in Shanghai in 2021, where Chen worked around an existing sycamore tree whose branches, shadows and seasonal transformations became part of the mural.
He described an idea that continually accompanied his practice: “Think big, do small. If there is no accumulation of small streams, there is no way to become a river.” GraffitiStreet, Natural Gravity 41 / GRAVITY XLI, 2021
It is an unexpectedly modest philosophy for an artist who regularly works at monumental scale. Yet the phrase suggests that scale is not achieved through grandiosity, but through accumulation: repeated gestures, repeated experiments and countless small acts of attention eventually producing something larger than any one of them. His career itself begins to resemble the same idea.
Natural Gravity 41 / GRAVITY XLI, Shanghai, 2021, where Chen allowed light, architecture and a living sycamore tree to continue changing the work beyond the moment of painting. Read the full GraffitiStreet feature
“Every Creation Is a New Test”
In 2025, during Chen’s almost three-month studio project at He Art Museum in Foshan, another invisible force entered the work. For Sound-Painting Resonance, low-frequency sound passed through a specially tensioned canvas, creating vibrations that altered the movement of sprayed pigment across its surface.
The experiment extended ideas Chen had previously explored through wind and weather into sound, and his reflection on the residency was characteristically unresolved: “Every creation is a new test.” Pearl River Business News / Shunde Library, 2025
That sentence may offer the clearest explanation of why his practice continues to evolve. Chen already possesses a highly recognisable visual language, yet rather than protecting it through repetition, he repeatedly places himself in situations capable of destabilising what he knows.
The street taught him speed and risk; Chinese painting gave him another understanding of energy, movement and empty space; racing sharpened his awareness of physical thresholds; the mountains introduced wind, snow, light and altitude; and at HEM, sound became capable of moving pigment.
Across all of these experiences, one idea remains remarkably consistent: the artist establishes the conditions, but does not necessarily dictate everything that follows.
Perhaps this is why Chen Yingjie becomes more interesting the further one moves beyond the spectacular surface of Hua Tunan. His mature practice is not simply concerned with controlling materials exceptionally well, but with understanding when control should stop. His own words reveal an artist increasingly prepared to listen to the answer.
Chen Yingjie at He Art Museum in 2025, where sound, vibration and live experimentation extended his continuing enquiry into what happens when another force is allowed to enter the painting. Read the full GraffitiStreet HEM feature
Sources & Further Reading
Hypebeast — Studio Visits: Chen Yingjie, 2022 Read the interview
The Paper — Chen Yingjie Interview, 2022 Read the interview
ArtAlpha / LONG Museum — Chen Yingjie Interview, 2024 Read the interview
SuperELLE — Chen Yingjie: Let Nature Become Part of Creation, 2024 Read the interview
Pearl River Business News / Shunde Library — Chen Yingjie at He Art Museum, 2025 Read the report
GraffitiStreet — Natural Gravity 41 / GRAVITY XLI, 2021 Read the article
Chen Yingjie working inside He Art Museum during 够姜 [gau3goeng1], his first museum studio project and a further exploration of what can happen when control is deliberately left incomplete. Read the HEM feature
Explore Chen Yingjie / Hua Tunan
Chen Yingjie’s evolution from the explosive visual language of Hua Tunan towards a more intuitive, landscape-led practice makes his work particularly compelling to follow… and to collect. Explore available original works and limited editions through GraffitiStreet, or contact the gallery directly for acquisition enquiries, provenance, condition reports and private viewing information.