Nature nominee

Entering the age of civilisation, human starts to shape nature based on our needs, even modifying genes to make plants easy to breed. Part of the nature has already adapted to their new role in modern society.Those plants that did not belong to some local systems are now appearing and interweaving with all sorts of artificial light, creating bizarre yet eye-catching scenes which remind me of some long forgotten tales.
This on-going project begins with a new type of wild beauty that is co-created by human and nature. The capture of these individual fragments is an exploration of the tangled relationship between human and nature. Civilisation and nature are constantly interacting with each other, maintaining an ambiguous relationship. While exclaiming over the timeless beauty of nature, these images might also be a reflection of the future direction of nature evolution and human-nature relationship.

Yi Chen was born in 1989 Xiamen, China. In his opinion, imagination is always a part of interpretation. Images can be an ideal medium for this. It’s both so strictly rational and so poetic, like trying to blend history and mythology into a story that will look like a convincing fact in the future, and it’s always something more, something beyond the actual story’s quality of a tale. For Yi Chen, he believes the image itself is the result of memory, a memory of which, we as viewers, we will be always unaware and we will be only suggesting. He has been received several awards including the 8th Paris Photography Prize (Px3) honourable mention and the 2014 International Photography Awards (IPA) honourable mention. His recent exhibitions include ‘wild L,’ Nothing Gallery, Xiamen,China (2014), ‘The Possibility of An Island,’ Xiamen, China (2015) and Organic Iconography, AOTU studio, Beijing, China (2015).