underwater
Brushstrokes flow like water,
drifting through a dreamlike atmosphere.
When I was a child, I fell into the river in front of my home
and almost drowned.
I still vaguely remember the terror of being underwater,
the desperate feeling of not being able to breathe.
But now, I have learned to swim.
When I dive deep into the sea,
I find myself surrounded by so many beautiful forms of life.
This work is a reflection on the way I face fear—
how, with time, fear begins to dissolve
into the dreamlike colors of the water,
until what once frightened me
becomes something quiet, beautiful,
and strangely tender.
trees
Trees are nature's song. For a long time, I dreamed of becoming a tree: roots reaching deep into the earth, firm and steadfast; branches reaching toward the sky, longing for the freedom of the spirit.
performance
about
chuchu is a painter and performance artist based in Beijing. Her practice moves between two very different forms, painting and performance, but it is driven by a single question: what happens to a body when it is pressed on by its surroundings? Earth, water, air, the weight of objects, the gaze of others. In her performances, she meets that pressure directly, with her own body. In her paintings, the pressure passes into landscape, and the body appears only as a trace, a shadow, or something slowly dissolving.
Seen together, the three bodies of work are continuous. The soil she once poured over her own body becomes the grit pressed into her canvases. The held breath of the performances becomes the submerged world of underwater. The shadow she printed from the ground becomes the shadows that fall across trees. Even her paint behaves like her performance materials: piled, scraped, sanded, and left to settle.
Her color carries the feeling that the figures no longer do. Aqua, coral pink, and acid yellow-green are never naturalistic; they are charged, unsettled, and slightly unreal, like light seen through water or remembered after dark. Across every medium, chuchu returns to the moment of being held under, by earth, by water, by the weight of things, and to the slow, patient act of surfacing.