Yi Chen

"Yi Chen's hybrid portraits have their roots in collage. He assembles unlikely faces from eyes mouths, noses and ears cut from Asian fashion magazines and advertisements and then paints part-illusionistic, part-abstract faces based on them. The results are uncanny - faces where all the component parts are in the right place, but are mismatched and lopsided. His paintings draw allusions to plastic surgery or cloning, the concept of designing a new face to order...Chen raises awareness of the trend in Asia of using surgery to appear more 'Western', to conform to the images of beauty presented in the media. But in Chen's work, the resulting beauty is in fact grotesque, and through patch working facial elements he creates people with no identity left to call their own." from - Mullins, Charlotte, 'Painting People', Thames and Hudson, London, 2006

Chen's work is reminiscent of Picasso, but with a more contemporary context of plastic surgery and magazine cut-out collage. You can't trust what you see in these paintings, you want to read these as people, and you can almost imagine someone actually looking like this but not through natural means.