yufei chen

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This work motivated by my experience of the urbanisation process that took place in China. Since I was little, I rarely remember myself playing inside a natural environment like other kids often do. The only sounds and scenes I often encountered as playgrounds were near construction sites and the unceasing noise of bulldozers. I wonder, where did the nature go? When I asked my parents, they talked about a childhood experience of being in deep contact with nature that I was not able to imagine.

In this work, I reuse abandoned natural materials—the Chinese landscape stone, a special stone in China often used as decoration in gardens, representing nature in small vistas. However, these stones are often abandoned or left over because their shape or appearance is not ideal for buyers, or does not fit the traditional Chinese need of “FengShui”. For me, this material symbolises a condition of human society’s demand for efficiency and perfection in how we extract resources from the earth, while forgetting the spiritual and cultural link we have with nature.

These abandoned stones are modified with highly artificial methods. I scoop out artificial cylinders from these stones, displaying the cylinders drilled out in descending order beside them, demonstrating the most common way we extract from the earth—to get as much as we can.

The title, Anthropocene, presents my aim of mocking the “anthropocentric” mindset, which sees humans as higher than nature itself, and how our actions are making us further distanced from nature. With this work, I call for rebuild.

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