Lost at Home: Conversations with Returnee Cultural Practitioners uncovers how cultural practitioners who return to China after years abroad navigate the tension between belonging and estrangement, reshaping identity and institutional realities along the way. Part of the Goethe-Institut’s East and Central Asia project Solitude: Loneliness & Freedom—this interview series traces their strategies for sustaining cultural freedom in a rapidly shifting China, opening new space to rethink ‘roots’ and the future of creative work. In the second part Curator Jenny Chen interviews artist Alice Chen.
Born in Yiwu, China, in 1975, Alice Chen is based in both Shanghai and Paris. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1999, she burst onto China’s experimental art scene with a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Post-Sense Sensibility. Her practice spans photography, painting and works on paper. In 2018, under the pseudonym “Alice Chen”, she founded the Positive Art Research Center in Shanghai to explore and promote art’s capacity to drive social and human transformation.
From Yiwu to Beijing: The “in-between” generation
Alice Chen:I was born in 1975, shortly before the launch of China’s “Reform and Opening-Up” policy [1978] and the “cultural craze” of the 1980s. While I was studying at university in the ’90s, Chinese society was undergoing a sea change, given the huge impact of its transition to an open-market economy and globalization – and despite the lingering idealism of the 1980s. I started working freelance before graduating and took part in exhibitions like Post-Sense Sensibility.
I’m of the same generation as Liang Shuo and Liang Yuanwei, but often mistaken for their senior. I’m actually always somewhere “in the middle”: influenced by the “big questions” of the 1980s, but not fully part of the generation who went abroad or grew up with the Internet.
To me, painting was never my destination, but a ticket out of my small-town existence and into the world of “literati and artists”. [...] I never see art purely as a profession or an interest, but as a path to a better world. It means freedom, meaning, value, and it can bring me a measure of happiness amid difficulties. Art is like a wooden plank drifting on the open sea: you don’t know whether it’ll carry you to shore, but you have to keep paddling all the same. Along the way, you may find companions and feel less lonely.
Art as a shelter and “retreat”
Alice Chen: I love contemporary art and I’m grateful to be able to identify as an “artist”. That identity is like an amulet: artists are free to be whimsical, to fail, or to work across disciplines. To me, the art world is a shelter, a gathering place for “heterogenous” individuals who can understand one another.
Fill in the Blanks was a piece charged with feminist consciousness, a form of resistance to institutional and capitalist logics as well as a clear-cut expression of withdrawal from the art world. I released it right before International Women’s Day as a critique of the stereotypes imposed on female artists, who are expected to get married, give birth and then withdraw from the art world. A lot of people thought I “gave up art because of my marriage”. At first I tried to explain, but gradually I came to realize that withdrawal was a decision requiring no explanation.
Withdrawal doesn’t mean leaving for good, but a rigorous and resolute artistic method.
The Positive Art Research Center (PARC) opened in 2018. I gave myself a new name: Alice Chen – a pseudonym that gives me ample scope for action. [...] It draws on the Confucian philosophy of “actively entering the world” to do something “useful”, but it also indicates a vision: art still has the power to conjure utopia, even though it does not exist.
Jenny Chen (JC):I’m planning to turn my home into a semi-open shared space. I want it to remain intimate, but not a closed private residence. This isn’t just an alternative housing plan, but a response to the question of “how to live and how to create”.
Alice Chen (AC): This kind of “Apartment Art” has regained popularity in recent years, especially after the pandemic. In Hangzhou, many friends of mine have opened up their homes – not necessarily for exhibitions, but as sites for creative interchange and interaction or as “artistic nodes”.
JC: When I entered the art world, the system was already quite developed. The thinking behind much of the literature and curatorial work was: “Others ask the questions and I give answers.” But during the three pandemic years, this approach was invalidated. I even experienced a sense of aphasia as a result. [...] It only lasted for a while, but it made me realize that subjectivity is not about what others say you are, but what you’re dying to say to the world.
AC: We’re quite alike. The uncertainties I felt during the pandemic pushed me back into the art world. [...] The virus crossed all borders; all of humanity was suffering together as a result. Rather than spending all my time at home “doomscrolling”, I figured I’d be better off taking up some interesting project: Project Terrace was the result. While artists couldn’t produce masks or food, we could still take useful action.
AC:Is Shanshui Useful Today? was a project I started in 2023. It stemmed from my post-pandemic reflection: In an age riddled with challenges and uncertainties, what can art do? [...] Could shanshui, a unique corpus of artistic imagery in Chinese culture, hold renewed relevance today? How could it serve people nowadays – and be shared with the world?
Shanshui is both a visual system and a philosophy, a social stance and a way of life. Whether in the narrow, literal sense of shanshui art or in the wider sense of the shanshui ethos and philosophy, it involves reflecting on our social and existential conditions.
JC: I feel your project is rooted in tradition as well as being responsive to the contemporary context. It extends shanshui’s vision and gives rise to new forms. This resonates with my post-doctoral research on diasporic aesthetics, which ultimately comes back round to shanshui too.
AC: Thank you for saying that. I wonder if you’ve noticed that whenever the mood in China becomes tense, people tend to resort to shanshui. [...] It’s more than a strategy, it’s an inner urge. Shanshui is inscribed in our cultural genes.
JC: I agree. When artistic practice turns towards shanshui, it’s likely to have a more metaphysical kind of spiritual grounding. Politically oriented work often involves struggle, confrontation and ideological clashes. It’s an aggressive and directional means of expression. What shanshui provides, on the other hand, is not confrontation, argumentation, but a spatial and spiritual unfurling that produces a fundamental shift in tone and greater depth.
AC: Absolutely. [...] I’ve been asking myself recently: Do I have to become an “international” artist? The anxiety behind that question stems from the pressure to achieve international “success”. The turn towards shanshui might be a way of reclaiming subjectivity. Maybe the question isn’t “where to achieve success” but “where to start”. Transforming my home into an artistic space may be a way to ground artistic endeavor in everyday life and to access my inner world.
Lost at home: Finding your moorings while still adrift
AC: One anecdote often comes to mind in this connection: When Matteo Ricci arrived in China, he presented the emperor and officials of the Ming Dynasty with a world map that placed China at the center. This layout catered to their worldview while subliminally arousing their curiosity about the outside world. I think this kind of “cartographic thinking” can be internalized on a personal level, too: if we were to map the macro-world onto the individual, then the spine would constitute the central axis of the body. This “center” doesn’t exclude the outside world: on the contrary, it provides the foundation for outward exploration.
JC: You’ve already talked about the tension of being “lost at home”. It involves two opposing concepts. Many people of my generation study or work abroad and are constantly on the move, which blurs your sense of “home”: “home” is no longer about “belonging”. [...] We’re constantly asking ourselves: Where am I now? Where is my spiritual mooring? The more and longer you migrate, the more lost you feel, which is always accompanied by anxiety and a sense of crisis.
AC: I understand. The drifting is not only geographic; the entire world feels as if it’s floating. [...] I’m still searching: Should there be a specific place to which each of us is culturally and emotionally attached? Without it, even when we’re looking outwards, “turning towards the world”, it feels like something essential is missing. [...] Which makes me all the more impressed by the sophistication of shanshui culture. Whether in painting, calligraphy or its underlying philosophy, shanshui is intricate and refined in ways that are absent from Western traditions. Naturally, I’m opposed to narrow-minded nationalism, but we should not refrain from admiring genuinely brilliant achievements in our own culture.
JC: I’m currently conducting research on Chinese women artists for the Asia Art Archive. Back in your day, were you ever even exposed to the concept of “feminism”? In what context was it discussed and understood?
AC: I was in Beijing around the year 2000. Back then, there were very few women in the art scene. Conversations about politics, philosophy and art history were almost entirely dominated by men. If a woman wanted to get involved, that was often seen as a “transgression”. [...]
I believe that any genuine solution to gender issues will require equal participation in society and public discourse – not the passive acceptance of gender roles. In the old system, power was not equally distributed. As a woman, you had to endure both “special treatment” and invisibility. [...] As I enter menopause, I actually feel that I have, to some extent, “transcended” gender and become the “third sex”, a state that gives me more freedom.
Looking back on Twelve Flower Months, I feel the label “female artist” was a double-edged sword: it brought both opportunities and reductive interpretations, even misinterpretations. My practice goes in multiple directions, but that’s often overlooked. I’m an art practitioner, not just a so-called “female artist”. It’s a relief to be able to create freely, and embark on our own projects now. At last, we no longer need to explain anything about being a woman; we can just do what we want. That’s a lot.
