"Freshly Dreamed"

Solo exhibition by Sijie Chen
Reception: Friday, June 2nd, 2017 6-9 pm
On view from June 2nd to 6th 2017

             Fuchs Projects is pleased to host a solo show , titled "Freshly Dreamed" by Sijie Chen.

For immediate press:

“Grandma’s house became a desert palace, the floor of which was covered with thick sand. I opened the door of my aunt’s bedroom, there appeared a bed, covered with a white blanket with scattered yellow stains.
Frightened, how I wish to run away
I could not find my way. The corridor was turned into a dilapidated theater.
Buried in the sand, I saw hundreds of stone dolls.”
mushroom, donuts, blue, sea, a tiny meat mountain, the television in a kitchen, moving creatures in the darkness, bushes, a floating egg...
Fuchs Project will open a solo exhibition by Sijie Chen on June 02, on view through June 6. Freshly Dreamed will feature Sijie Chen’s collection of digital paintings, hand-drawn architectural drawings, as well as a furniture piece and animated video.
Sijie Chen’s paintings unveil a colorful and fresh world consisting of daily objects - donuts, window with curtain, television in a kitchen, bushes in front of door, a tiny piece of meat, banana, bottle water, etc. By applying the abstract geometrical composition and juxtaposing different objects poetically and playfully, the images bring both innocence and sophistication, gently blurring and erasing the line between dream and reality by introducing the lightness and uncanniness that naturally flow from the paintings.
Sijie Chen’s hand drawn architectural drawings are with the same subject. Majored in architecture, she uses her most familiar tool to construct a whimsical surrealistic dream land of fantasies where spaces — the architectural whims — are inhabited by quirky characters with their embodied spirit, memory and history. The drawing paper as the “mirror”, the artist is on one side,  and the created world is on the other; it is abominable to tell who reflects who, who multiplies who. With poetry as an inseparable part of the work, Sijie was looking for a possible and ever-changing answer as to place, memory, dream, subconsciousness and language, or ambitiously speaking, the humanity.
Also on view of Freshly Dreamedwill be Sijie’s three-dimensional work - a furniture piece, and a real-time controlled video “Archived Utopia”. Sijie Chen’s interests on dream, absurdity, andotherness stem from her contemplation of the desert of life; Not only reflecting sarcastically the emptiness and rigidness of the consumerist society, her work depicts a vivid picture of a possible world of enigma, ambiguity and phantasms, withits deep relation to the origins of human beings - desire, bewilderment, sympathy, mystery, ambiguity and innocence.

About the artist

Originally from China, Sijie Chen is an artist and architect who is living and working in New York City. Currently working at Rafael Vinoly Architects, she graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a Master of Architecture degree in June 2014. Her work has been exhibited in Cloud Gallery, Holy Apostles Gallery, Providence Convention Center, Rhode Island AIA Office, etc. Her recent exhibitions are featured on major medias in China, including People’s Daily Overseas, China Youth Online, Artron.net, Guangming Online etc. Working with diverse medias including drawing, writing, digital print and video, her work emphasizes comprehension of the doubled condition in contemporary society, oscillating the dichotomy of inner and outer, surface and substance, subject and object, digging for love and intuition and poetic imagination in architectural creation. Through exploring drawing as a way of thinking, hovering around the question of drawing as a way of representation and as a way of being, her work is asking, uttering and echoing the uniqueness of being, inexplicability of image, mysteries of metaphor and chaotic/dreamlike reality, underneath the surface. She hopes to create an architectural language of her own, a possible world that is exotic but deeply relational to the universe where the most trivial thing — the living and nonliving, absurd dreams and hallucinations — are free to thrive.