Tropical Room: Chen Dandizi

With the greeting of this chilly winter in Beijing, Hua International is pleased to present Tropical Room, Chen Dandizi’s first solo exhibition in Beijing.

This exhibition will systematically present Chen Dandizi’s recent artistic thinking and practice under the propositions of "tropical" and "empire”. Tropical Room implies a theme beyond "tropics" as a purely geographical area and "room" as a surface interpretation of physical space. Chen Dandizi integrates semantic and complex cultural symbols into the fictional post-colonial daily space in this exhibition, which contains traces of tropical colonial history, especially in the wet, marginal nature where the landscape has been permeated by the imperial center.

Chen Dandizi continues her way of creation, while observing the imaginative transformation through image, sound, installation, sculpture, text and other media, dissociates and reconstructs the natural and man-made landscapes involved in the colonial history from real life. The Sun Never Sets presented in the video installation hides the closely related but completely different destinies of Western colonists and tropical colonized areas; The ghost of the empire wanders in the tropics, and this symbiosis and parasitic coexistence is also reflected in Crown of Thorns; In the video work The Romantic Hunter, temperate animals are chasing tropical animals, and Chen Dandizi imitates and reproduces the transformation of natural order by manpower in a colonial context. Her new works in Tropical Room continues the comparison and questioning of the surrounding environment. The artist imagines and presents the contradictions that endlessly affect the tropical landscape considering what Western colonists brought to the tropical colonies both as poison and medicine.

Chen Dandizi was born in Hezhou, Guangxi in 1990. She graduated from the oil painting department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She lives and works in Guangzhou and Hangzhou. Dandizi's works has been included in recent solo exhibition at Canton Gallery, Guangzhou,China; her group exhibitions were held in ShanghART M50, OCAT Shenzhen, Para Site, West Bund Art &Design, Beijing Contemporary Art Expo, HuA International, Capsule Gallery, Galleria Continua, Spurs Gallery, Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture, Frick Fine Arts Building University of Pittsburgh, Mexico National Culture Digital Center, Lianzhou Foto Festival 2019. Finalist in the ART SANYA & HUAYU Youth Award.