Prioritising a constructed image over a cognitive one, Chen’s work in the past has investigated the weight of history and social convention as it pertains to individual identity. In these paintings, the dreamlike images and focus on themes of construction and demolition invoke not only the recent sense of lost physical connection, but perhaps also our increasingly distanced relationship to wider, metaphysical values.

In the series titled The Blocks, the artist explores the idea of bricks (or blocks) as carriers of multiple meaning; of building and demolition, or construction and obstruction. Recalling the subtle, powdery tones of Giorgio Morandi’s still lives, they are directly inspired by the improvised roadblock devices used in recent social protests and draw from Internet images which the artist gathered while on a residency in Paris during 2020.

Featuring small groups of bricks – some intact, some broken – constructed into arches or ‘buildings’, they appear carefully studied from life; a picture of the ordinary and the close at hand while symbolically pointing elsewhere: to the beginnings of architecture, to improvised shelters, blocks and barricades. Having the ability to both build and destroy, to be stacked together or thrown, these sketchily rendered, shadowy forms make quiet reference to the brick as a symbol of ‘silent protest.’

Themes of resistance, destruction and reorganisation inform a series of works depicting composite, fractured tree trunks, formed from roughly patched together sections of trees, whose branches and roots have been truncated. Made structurally infirm by their formal collapse, they seem lifeless, bearing, in some paintings, a few leafless branches like articulated prosthetic limbs. Recalling folk tales or children's stories, their uncanny, fantastical atmosphere is emphasised by pastel colours and bright blue skies, all of which is suggestive of an unnatural force driving their compositions.

Chen’s paintings often embrace a sense of déjà vu, through allegorical or symbolic motifs that haunt the scenarios. Placing the viewer either close-up to his subjects or at a great distance, the scale is erratic and disjointed, as if the scene is divorced from spatial or temporal reality. A sense of intrusion is emphasised through the motif of shutters or blinds, which act to both obscure and reveal: a physical division between the viewer and the viewed, the object and its comprehending subject.

The confinement of lockdown, the seemingly endless repetition of daily tasks and the discerning sense of melancholy engendered by the pandemic is addressed in Study of Flattening I, II and III (2021) which feature female figures ironing swathes of white material on bright-coloured ironing boards. Enveloped in steam, the scene seems distant, as if a memory, while the thick horizontal bands of the venetian blind, which run across the top of each painting, suggest we the viewer are close-up, peering through a window. Partially obscured by the blind, the woman is faceless, impersonal; an abstracted vision.

In The Shutters (2021), a man in a bedroom, half-dressed in a blue shirt, peers through the gaps of a broken blind, the bleary look on his face illuminated by warm morning light. The painting’s palpable atmosphere of isolation and claustrophobia – of physical entrapment – is accentuated by the neat, slanting shadows of the blind thrown onto the adjacent wall, which recall the bars of a prison cell.