Arch Gallery is pleased to announce that it will present Chen Mutian's solo exhibition Residence on Earth: Treading, Tactility, Wildness at its Shanghai space on June 27th. This exhibition revolves around the artist's experiences of hiking in the rainforest.
"Throughout 2025, I trekked incessantly through the tropical rainforests of Southern China and Borneo. The dampness, the itching, the stifling heat on my skin, the overwhelming stimulus of countless species, and a wandering state of mind – all of this constantly assailed me. It gave rise to imaginations that were mysterious, fantastical, wild, and uncanny, accompanied by a distinct sense of unease and tension.
Through this relentless walking and pushing my body to its limits, I completed an inner journey filled with self-dialogue, inner struggles, and eventual reconciliation. It was like entering a desert within my mind; every single step pushed me to confront and pursue that self which had been forgotten, neglected, and even actively avoided."
—— Mutian Chen
Treading
The artist’s repeated journeys through tropical rainforests allowed her to transcend her established social roles. These expeditions were not mere sightseeing but sustained, physical trials—deliberate pilgrimages into heterogeneous environments. Here, she confronted and pursued the neglected, even evaded, self, internalizing nature until it became an extension of her own body. In doing so, she achieved a mutual permeation of self and wilderness. Her recent artistic evolution has originated in this pilgrimage: the rainforest environment engendered phantasmagoric, mystical, and uncanny imaginings, interwoven with sensations of unease and tension—manifestations of subconscious surges in a non-rational state. Thus, the artist’s new reflections intertwine intrinsically with nature, capturing ephemeral encounters with the creator behind the natural world and transmitting a primordial, mystical aura.
Tactility
The aura conveyed in Chen Mutian’s work is fundamentally a counterforce to the tradition of Ocularcentrism. This tradition binds vision to rationality, forming "Scopic Regimes" that objectify the world. It equates visibility with mimesis without truly liberating the senses, most visibly epitomized by smoothness—the sleekaesthetics of contemporary society erases all negativity and harm, manufacturing a frictionless beauty. In contrast, an aesthetics of tactility values the rough and textural within a work, emphasizing the materiality and internality of artistic experience. Furthermore, following the articulation of the "Schéma Corporel" (body schema), touch has been recognized as the primordial mode of bodily existence-in-the-world—the most intimate and immediate foundation for establishing a connection with the earth. In this context, artists across disciplines began restoring the significance of tactility through their practice.
Chen Mutian’s work employs traditional methods like embroidery and weaving to engage this tactile aesthetics. She transcribes the rainforest’s humid heat, fecundity, and complexity onto soft textiles, using touch to forge intimacy between humans and the earth, and in doing so resists the sensory deprivation of sleekness. Tactility captures spiritual truths inaccessible to vision; as the body’s primal mode of perception, it possesses an emancipatory power—just as an infant constructs its earliest understanding of self and world through tactile experiences like sucking.
Wildness
The artist refuses to romanticize nature. Her work juxtaposes the awe-inspiring vitality, complexity, and savage beauty of the natural world—where life burgeons, vines dance, and the rainforest’s spirituality or divinity manifests as a terrifyingly potent force of creation and decay. With equal candor, she presents its "uncanniness," "gloom," "unease," and even "decay." This unflinching, penetrating observation captures often-overlooked, profoundly disquieting details. She posits that "fecundity" and "terror" are inseparable, symbiotic aspects of nature; authentic "seeing" must encompass both. This embrace of existence’s duality constitutes its profundity—the very moment of Dillardian "awe."
Within nature, human insignificance becomes starkly apparent. The artist received direct, visceral experiences from the wild that challenged her senses—fear, reverence, curiosity... all expanded unprecedentedly in this rainforest setting. This simultaneously embodies a recognition of life/existence’s inherent complexity: where beauty coexists with unease, vitality with decay, the human-made with the wild.
