Chen Chunmu

Chen Chunmu

Chen Chunmu (b. 1981, Anxi, Quanzhou, China; based in Beijing) is a significant practitioner in contemporary Chinese painting and visual language exploration. He graduated in 2003 from the Oil Painting Department of the College of Fine Arts at Fujian Normal University. Since then, he has remained actively engaged in major art scenes in China and internationally. As early as 2002, he began participating in numerous group exhibitions and art projects, working across media including oil painting, installation, and mixed materials.

Deeply influenced by his personal experiences of growth, along with a sensitive engagement with nature and the subconscious, Chen’s artistic language is marked by the recurring presence of strange plants, hybrid creatures, and subtly ambiguous spaces. Through fluid brushwork and dreamlike colour palettes, he constructs visual worlds that hover between reality and imagination. His imagery emerges from an ongoing exploration of childhood memory, natural ecology, and bodily perception, while also reflecting contemporary individuals’ contemplation of identity, environment, and the inner self amid rapid social transformation.

Chen’s works have been presented in major group exhibitions such as the China–ASEAN Art Biennale (2013), The Big Bang at the White Rabbit Museum, Australia (2010), and The World as It Appears—Exhibition of Ten at Gehua Art Museum, Beijing. His works are also held in the collection of the White Rabbit Museum.

He has held exhibitions in cities including Singapore, Málaga, Beijing, Fuzhou, and Hong Kong. Notable solo exhibitions include Worms Revolution (Soobin Art International, Singapore, 2011); Burying Oneself in the Soil and Waiting to Sprout and Make an Honest Flower (both 2015); and Intruder / Quietly in Pain (2016). Notably, in 2024, Chen became the first and only Chinese artist to present a solo exhibition at Museo Casa Natal Picasso, Málaga, Spain. Together, these exhibitions articulate his sustained inquiry into image-making mechanisms, pictorial surfaces, and the relationship between inner narratives and visual form.

Chen Chunmu’s practice extends the tradition of oil painting toward greater material specificity and non-linear expression. Through a distinctive visual vocabulary, his work engages with key concerns in contemporary art discourse, including order and disorder, nature and civilisation, and the interwoven states of memory and existence.