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Show RCA 2019

Qiuyi Chen

Show RCA work

Major project:

Unfriendly Still Life

For Qiuyi's final show at the Royal College of Art, she is focusing on creating new still life paintings of the 21st century, by adding dimensions and time into the 16th century masters' work, such as Cézanne. In the hopes of bringing new attention and renewing appreciation through her experimental creating processes, Qiuyi used real fruits as a raw material in art-making in the belief that it is the most honest response to create work. They are not a duplicate copy of nature, nor a representation. It is a direct depiction of nature, an archive of objects' existence in nature. 

Info

  • Qiuyi is an artist moving through time.

    She has a very fluid art and design practice, and a very extensive curiosity of the world. Her works are considered to be engagingly diverse and appetising; often generating direct responses through interactive experiences, which create a closer relationship with her audience and helps them realise the significance of individual experiences.

    Qiuyi’s interests range from digital technology, and ethics of AI, to human-centred consumerism of food and identity. While embracing both playful art in everyday life and aesthetical high art in galleries, she’s never satisfied with just being an illustrator, so she constantly seeks to engage beyond traditional ways of flat surface storytelling into multi-dimensional narratives.

  • Previous degrees

  • BA Illustration Pratt Institute, New York, 2012
  • Experiences

  • Popup book designer, Robert Sabuda Studio, New York, 2016–17
  • Exhibitions

  • Exploded Screen, Block 9; Exploded Stories, Garden House; Archive(r), Tate Britain; Green Point Gallery Salon Show; Pratt NYC, Design Show
  • Awards

  • American Illustration (AIAP) 35; World Illustration Awards (AOI); Society of Illustrators Student Award; American illustration (AIAP) 36
Royal College of Art