Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @Sunspringersl6
Yufei Chen is an artist based in London and Beijing. His practice experiments in various forms in producing counterarguments to the deeply rooted imperial narrative in our current institutional and public spheres.

His work often takes inspiration from historical documents and museum archives as a starting point of investigation, where he aims to produce ghostly images, photos, animation, and sculptures that seem to be transferring, fading away or unrecognisable, in resisting the imperial thinking that everything should be documented clearly through an imperial lens.

The artist believes the crises of misplacement of cultures, misinterpretation of weaker communities, and cultural erasure are still happening and should not be marked as past “history.” In the most recent works, the artist uses the melting of ice sculptures of historical artefacts that suffered from colonial plunder, or implements cyanotype with re-washing process of personal album tangled with geopolitical context in producing works that is often in a motion of disappearing, attempting to retell these neglected stories while refusing to be capture or reproduce them for Western benefit.


Education
2025 - 2026 Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art, London
2022 - 2025 BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, London

Selected Group Exhibitions
2024
SOGLIE DELL’ INVISIBLE, ISOLART GALLERY, Italian

Awards
2025
Winner of the 2025 Maison/0 Awards, London
yufei chen
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An Excavation on the “British” Land
2023, 3D PLA Prints (in various dimensions), soil, the work size can be in Variable dimensions
This work starts with my investigation on the glazed Liao dynasty Luohan statue in the British Museum’s collection, which can be found in the central area of Room G33.

My investigation was motivated from a joke made by my friend saying that the statue and I look very much alike. I began wondering how this statue ended up in the British Museum collection. I then not only found that this statue belongs to a larger group of originally twelve figures discovered in a secret cave in Hebei, Yixian, but that they also serve as significant victims of Japanese and European colonial plunder, and the Western-dominated “Global Antique Trade Market” around the 2000s. The existing remains of these luohan figures are now located across Japan, the UK, the US, France, and Canada—except in their original place, China. These findings made me gradually question the so-called “neutral” authority of the Western museum system.

With this questioning attitude in mind, I made duplications of these luohan faces through digital printing. I engraved museum texts and museum numbers from the official records onto the faces, presenting the indelible violence that turned these objects into museum artefacts.

In Chinese culture, the luohan represents an individual who reaches enlightenment through suffering. As a way to suffer with the artefacts, I blended my face with the luohan’s face as a question: “By sharing similar faces, will I be treated as an artefact as well and suffer from plunder in the same way?” That is a question I want to raise against Western ethnology as well as museology.

In a forest on the edge of London, I fabricated a fake archaeological excavation. With no linear order in presenting how these artefacts are taken out of the gourd or placed back into it, the activity presents a dual illusion. It appears as an excavation, while it can also be viewed as a funeral that marks the fact that these artefacts are permanently sealed within the Western museum framework, and that their original meaning and existence are stripped away.
2026
 Painting series: I shut my eyes through light and darkness
 2025
 Anthropocene
Ephemeral Withstood
The Residual Flame
When you see me, when will you see me?
 2024
 Spectacle of Bubbles
This is My Street
 2023
 An Excavation on the “British” Land