Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist, and runs a drawing, new media and installation practice. Her works excavates inheritances carried in one’s body, unravelling historical, aesthetic, cultural, technological, and genetic notions of embodiment. She researches cultural wounds, and tells auto-fictional stories of dowry traditions, scars, family values, nudities and embodied time. She received the prestigious National Arts Council Young Artist Award (2020), Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners, aged 35 and below. Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), ArtOutreach IMPART Visual Artist Award (2019), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018), and Japan Media Arts Festival (2012). She lectures at Yale-NUS College Singapore, and will be taking on the role of Professor of the Practice in Drawing at Tuft University School of Museum of Fine Art in 2023.
In Family Stories : Volume 3 “Discipline: The shit we tell ourselves” (workin title) , she will be examining principles of transformative justice, the history of corporal punishment in Singapore running up against personal and communal histories of childhood discipline and punishment. In the retelling of childhood discipline stories, the rewriting mechanism of memory work reveals illusions and delusions of autofiction and storytelling. The project seeks to consider—with irreverent humor—family stories gathered and remembered about the ways in which they were disciplined growing up, which unlike punishment, is often filled with good intentions. Family Stories : Volume 3 “Discipline: The shit we tell ourselves” is the third long-term art practice and research trajectory, following “Scars that Write Us” (2018), presented and awarded at the President’s Young Talent 2018 and “Stories of the Woman and her Dowry” (2019-2022), exhibited at Grey Projects and Objectifs Chapel Gallery Singapore.
