"…He transforms the sense of powerlessness embedded in reality, structural isolation, and even the fear of life being sealed away into images that are ‘logically absurd yet emotionally true."

— Roy Xuanrong CHEN

BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition, Displacement, by artist Yiming CHEN, from March 7 to April 3, 2026. Curated by WANG Yaoli. Centered primarily on painting, the exhibition also features a stop-motion film created by the artist. Structured around the translation, dislocation, and repositioning of images, CHEN reorganizes shapes, traces, and objects incidentally encountered in everyday experience to construct a perceptual framework situated between the real and the surreal. His works do not rely on explicit narrative content; instead, through a restrained and composed visual language, they generate a distinct tension infused with absurdity and irony.

Yiming CHEN’s practice often begins with images or “traces” captured in daily life. These forms, initially devoid of fixed meaning, undergo continual transformation and extension within his paintings, generating new vectors of reference and relational structures. This process is not merely one of deformation, but rather a strategic shift of position: objects are extracted from their original contexts and inserted into an alternative visual logic, producing subtle yet sustained cognitive dissonance. The exhibition title Displacement encapsulates this methodology. It refers to processes of misalignment, translation, and re-situation, deliberately avoiding any assignment of “correctness” or “falseness” to the image, thereby preserving its openness and indeterminacy.

Early exposure to graffiti culture—particularly the speed, immediacy, and graphic clarity characteristic of stencil graffiti practices—sharpened CHEN’s sensitivity to figurative form and visual signification. Upon returning to a sustained engagement with painting, he chose to begin not with technical refinement but with content and method, reactivating strategies developed through graffiti and stop-motion animation. Working primarily in grayscale and low-saturation palettes, he exercises rigorous control over brushwork rhythm and tonal contrast, constructing a lucid and disciplined visual order.

For CHEN, the act of creation retains a pronounced sense of play—akin to assembling building blocks or manipulating toys—where images can be freely generated, combined, and dismantled without full submission to empirical logic. Within this near-game-like condition, plot and narrative are compressed into what might be described as a “silent drama,” through which viewers gradually discern the latent absurdities and reversals embedded within the image. The paradoxes of reality are thus articulated through the use of metaphor and irony. Recurring motifs such as fish, roe, and canned sardines do not reenact specific events nor document concrete actions; rather, they index an unmistakably real condition: the powerlessness engendered by structural isolation, and the experiential state of the individual suspended between containment, preservation, and consumption.

Humor, therefore, becomes a mode of apprehending reality rather than a gesture of evasion or dissolution. CHEN does not adopt an overtly confrontational stance or pursue direct critique; instead, he takes reality as a point of departure, transforming it into an ongoing impetus for image-making and articulating his response through the process of painting itself. With a near-clinical composure, he translates affect into form and abstracts personal experience into visual metaphors capable of repeated viewing and renewed interpretation. Through the sustained operation of Displacement, reality is no longer explicitly declared but gradually emerges through nuanced misalignments and reconfigurations. Structures of power and conditions of subjectivity remain unnamed, yet they are subtly reorganized and perceptually recalibrated through quiet image shifts, rendering viewing a slow and durational mode of critical reflection.