Artemin Gallery is pleased to present Still Telling, a solo exhibition by Chen YuChun, on view from August 2 to September 6, 2025. The exhibition invites viewers into the quiet yet deeply resonant world of an artist who prefers to remain hidden—one who reveals, with great subtlety, how she inhabits her memories of space and finds stillness in a noisy world.

We begin by acknowledging that Chen YuChun’s anonymity is defined by her dislocation from her time. She tells stories—many of them—not in a rambling way, but with an almost urgent desire to speak, again and again. Like many others, she longs to be understood, to be recognized. And yet, her reserved demeanor is at odds with the intensity of her images: they pulse with quiet energy. Through her paintings, she portrays places she has visited or revisited, guided by life experience and the traces of memory. These encounters grant her new perspectives and new emotional states. And then, the transformation in her work takes shape through softly rendered, ambiguous spaces—a voice that is neutral, gentle, quiet, yet insistent. Rather than depicting specific events or recognizable figures, her paintings move away from figuration altogether.

Still Telling invites visitors to experience Chen YuChun as a flâneur in the Baudelairean sense, one whose perspective exists askew from the mainstream. Can you discern, in the paintings, her visits to several places in Taiwan such as Jiufen, Manzhou, Changhua, Jinshan, Hongshulin, Liuying, or a therapist’s office? This is not a simple drifting through city streets. If time, memory, language, and the hippocampus form a structure—or rather, an ever-shifting path—then the painter becomes a wanderer within it, observing. At a distance that hovers between cool detachment and quiet empathy, she watches for human traces: the gesture a hand leaves on the back of a chair, sunlight lingering on a rooftop, the echo of seaside wind on the body. She does not rush to explain. She restrains emotion, allowing viewing to become a slow, slow, slow, slow process of permeation.

Several strategies are employed to keep telling her “anonymous stories” by painting. One such strategy is the use of hands. In Gloves, for instance, the human face appears only as a reflection in a mirror; the person is painted indirectly, only the mirrored presence is shown. Most of the paintings contain human figures or at least parts of them. Only one work, The Shades of Night, omits the human form entirely—yet moonlight casts two full shadows onto the ground, revealing an absent presence. Hands recur throughout the exhibition: are they human hands? Gloves? Mannequin props? In these paintings, the hand becomes highly expressive, speaking on behalf of the artist who otherwise refrains from self-declaration.

Another strategy lies in Chen’s color palette. Just as she lets hands speak for her, here color becomes a silent narrator—not mere decoration, but a voice in its own right. She never uses flashy, high-saturation hues. Instead, her palette feels like an aftertaste left behind by time. While not strictly Morandi-esque, she shares with Morandi a logic of graying things down. By subduing brightness, she aligns color with her introspective and reserved visual language. These muted tones echo the yellowing of memory, not as a retreat, but as a conscious choice: a refusal of spectacle, a rejection of dramatic emotional engagement. The delicate gradations of her colors mirror the flâneur’s mode of observation—Chen YuChun’s palette is an extension of this act of looking, a deliberate aesthetic decision to walk along the edge.

For the flâneur, observation itself is the core activity and purpose of life. The flaneur is not as an outsider, but as a gentle, persistent presence. The goal is not to chase the center of stimulation but to examine the overlooked edges. To feel the undercurrents in silence. To recognize what once was, in places now fading.

To reflect this ethos, we are randomly playing two types of sound in the exhibition space: the ticking of an 1800s grandfather clock’s mechanical gears, and a kind of distant “quasi”-music. These are not music in the usual sense, but forms of sound that suggest the depth of time and the expansiveness of space. Their repetitive simplicity aligns with Chen YuChun’s still telling—stories told quietly, anonymously, and without flourish.

Venue
Artemin Gallery
111, Taiwan, Taipei City, Shilin District, Lane 251, Jihe Rd, No. 32, Floor 1

Artist
YuChun Chen

Exhibition Dates
Aug 2 – Sep 6, 2025

Contact
info@artemingallery.com

(Text and images courtesy of Artemin Gallery)