Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry is the first solo exhibition after Yanyun Chen’s successful outing at the Singapore Art Museum’s President’s Young Talents (PYT) showcase. It highlights the signature narrativity of her installations, both visible in the PYT presentation and here, where the work is as much seen as read, and text functions as theoretical and narrative devices equally, if not more so than visual ones.

The installation is organised novelistically, with four chapters and a prologue. Each chapter is named by a Chinese ideogram, each designating the roles and life-stages a woman was expected to occupy within the Chinese-Hainanese-Cantonese milieu of her family - 女 nu (woman), 妻 qi (bride), 娘 niang (wife), 母 mu (mother).

Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry is an installation work and a spatial auto-fiction, in which the walls of the Grey Projects space become the analogue to pages and text, and the encompassing space the spin of a biography of a young woman weighing the consequences of these expectations and staging a refusal. The installation draws filmic associations with scenes in Raise the Red Lantern (1991), A City of Sadness (1989), as well as literary allusions to an Ophelia-like body floating on a plain of liquid red.”

- Jason Wee

Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry has been exhibited at Grey Projects Singapore from 16th March 2019 to 27th April 2019; and at Art Science Museum from 23rd November 2019 to 10th August 2020.