Humid Variations
Recently, Chen Chunmu’s works have exhibited eerie, absurd, and extra‑daily linguistic characteristics that are unforgettable. His paintings resemble abnormally “growing” botanical atlases, extending into the “humid” context of his own experience, thereby recreating a mysterious, dreamlike landscape. This is a condensation of his personal creative lineage.
His solo exhibition adopts a multi‑dimensional perspective, encompassing elements of iconography, sociology, and folklore — keys that unlock the language of his painting.
Building on these dimensions, he expands the narrative of his personal artistic language — condensing memory, time, space, and the body onto the canvas — summarising and distilling his memories of his hometown in southern Fujian: the decay and fecundity of the humid, hot air, the mist‑wrapped, lush green tea gardens that surround the hills. Such accumulated natural symbols are transformed into a new artistic form, through which we can glimpse intertwined plants and insects, and further comprehend a form of unbridled, spreading growth. The flowing oil paint breeds like moss, presenting a microscopic and chaotic scene.
In this solo exhibition, he adopts new expressive techniques — installations composed of clothing, stuffing, and neon lights. The soft fabrics take on the appearance of skin‑like “mutant plants”, while hard resin, old photographs, seeds, texts, and rough wooden boards form a load‑bearing wall of life. This undulating texture is like the eerie and spiritual ecology of southern Fujian. Within this cultural context, Chen Chunmu transforms the humid, shadowy, and strange elements into an open artistic language — one that both metaphorises human nature and ecology and represents the fragility and tenacity of life.
Thus, his solo exhibition offers viewers a meditation on “humid aesthetics”. The artistic language he constructs is an arc that wanders between reality and illusion, seeking order in disorder, perceiving growth in obscurity.
Curator: Huang Du
May 25, 2026
