Street Artist in the Spotlight: Chen Yingjie / Hua Tunan
Chinese contemporary artist Chen Yingjie, also known previously as artist name Hua Tunan, has developed an explosive visual language that brings the traditions of Chinese ink painting into dialogue with graffiti, abstraction and contemporary muralism. Taught traditional Chinese painting techniques by his father, Hua later encountered street art while studying and travelling, gradually combining the discipline of ink with the spontaneity and scale of urban painting.
Animals and the natural world have long been central to his practice. Tigers, owls, falcons and other creatures emerge through sweeping brushwork, splashes and clouds of pigment, appearing to materialise from movement itself. More recent abstract works expand those ideas beyond the animal form, exploring landscape, energy, light and the forces of nature.
Chinese Ink Painting Meets Street Art
Chen Yingjie’s work draws upon the expressive qualities of traditional Chinese ink painting: controlled brushwork, fluidity, empty space and the ability to suggest movement with remarkably economical marks.
Graffiti introduced another kind of energy. Spray paint, splashes and physical gesture allowed those inherited techniques to expand across walls and increasingly large surfaces, creating compositions that can appear chaotic while remaining carefully controlled.
This meeting of Eastern painting traditions and contemporary street culture is central to Hua’s identity. Rather than abandoning traditional techniques, he has continually pushed them into new environments, allowing centuries-old approaches to landscape and animal painting to evolve through the scale, immediacy and experimentation of urban art.
Hua Tunan, Tiger. Image © Hua Tunan.
Animals, Nature and Controlled Energy
Chen Yingjie’s animals rarely feel static. A tiger appears mid-roar, a falcon cuts through an explosion of paint or an owl emerges from darkness, its body suggested through layers of ink, spray and colour.
The natural world provides both subject and method. Water, gravity, movement and the physical behaviour of paint become part of the image, allowing Chen Yingjie to balance deliberate brushwork with moments that cannot be entirely controlled.
In Dubai in 2016, he created a monumental falcon mural, choosing the UAE’s national bird as his subject. The following year, his mural for the 20x21EUG project in Eugene, Oregon carried this energetic language onto another major architectural surface.
Chen Yingjie’s participation in Sea Walls: Murals for Oceans in Bali in 2018 extended that connection with nature into an environmental context, joining international artists creating public works around marine conservation.
From Animals to Landscape and Abstraction
As Chen Yingjie’s practice has evolved, the explosive energy associated with his animals has increasingly moved into landscape and abstraction.
In Shanghai in 2021, Gravity XLI brought Chinese landscape painting directly into the contemporary city. Painted across a building on Nanchang Road, the work responded to the sycamore trees opposite the wall, allowing their changing shadows and seasonal growth to become part of the composition.
Gravity XLI demonstrates an important development in Chen Yingjie’s practice: the traditions of Chinese landscape painting are no longer simply referenced through imagery, but expanded into an environment where architecture, vegetation, light and painted gesture interact.
Chen Yingjie brought this kinetic language into the architecture of Shanghai’s Taikoo Li Qiantan. For the 2024 live work 《天满音色》, he painted a 30-metre canvas flowing across the development’s monumental staircase, combining Chinese landscape traditions, graffiti and improvised music in a four-and-a-half-hour public performance.
Collaborations Beyond the Street
Chen Yingjie’s distinctive visual language has also led to collaborations beyond murals and gallery work. In 2017, he joined Tiger Beer and WWF’s #3890Tigers campaign, using his tiger imagery to help raise awareness of the illegal wildlife trade and the decline of wild tiger populations.
His energetic fusion of Chinese ink painting and contemporary street art has also attracted collaborations with international luxury and lifestyle brands, including Cartier, extending his practice into fashion, design and global visual culture.
Chen Yingjie also recently completed an exclusive three-month artist studio residency and exhibition project at the He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde District, Foshan
Hua Tunan and GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet’s relationship with Chen Yingjie, known as Hua Tunan began in 2016, when he travelled from China to London for our Underground 2016 exhibition. Chen Yingjie created the monumental Uncaged live in London, bringing traditional Chinese painting methods and the physical energy of street art together in front of the exhibition audience.
Later that year, GraffitiStreet collaborated with Chen Yingjie on Night Luminescent Pearl, our first exclusive print release together. The hand-finished edition combined archival printing, screen-printed highlights and individually painted gold and white details.
The relationship continued through Fearless and, in 2019, Way of the Tiger, Chen Yingjie’s third exclusive print collaboration with GraffitiStreet. The tiger became a symbol of strength, courage and instinct, with each print individually finished using contour ink and 24-carat gold leaf.
In 2026, Chen Yingjie returned to the GraffitiStreet exhibition programme for Urban Equinox with Light Spreads Through Time, a unique abstract work in which his long-standing interest in nature, movement and energy is distilled into a more contemplative contemporary painting.
Related Reading: Chen Yingjie / Hua Tunan
Hua Tunan Unleashes the Tiger for Underground 2016 documents his journey from China to London and the creation of Uncaged for GraffitiStreet’s exhibition.
In Hua Tunan Paints the UAE’s National Bird, his explosive painting style transforms the falcon into a monumental public artwork in Dubai.
Night Luminescent Pearl goes behind GraffitiStreet’s first exclusive print collaboration with Hua Tunan, combining hand-pulled screen-printing with individual painted details.
Hua Tunan Paints for 20x21EUG follows the artist to Eugene, Oregon, as his fusion of Chinese painting and graffiti moved onto another monumental public wall.
GraffitiStreet also documented Hua at Sea Walls: Murals for Oceans, Bali, where artists from around the world used public art to address marine conservation.
In Way of the Tiger: Behind the Scenes, we follow the making of Hua’s third exclusive GraffitiStreet print, hand-embellished with contour ink and 24-carat gold leaf.
Gravity XLI reveals the later evolution of his practice, bringing Chinese landscape traditions, abstraction, street art and the living environment together in Shanghai.
More Artists in the Spotlight
For another artist bringing an historic Asian visual tradition into contemporary street art, explore RoamCouch, whose Neo Ukiyo-e practice connects Japanese craftsmanship with intricate stencil work and global cityscapes.
Discover PichiAvo for a different dialogue between art history and graffiti, fusing Greco-Roman mythology with contemporary urban painting, or Sonny Sundancer, whose powerful wildlife portraits share Hua’s fascination with animals, nature and movement.
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.