Chujun Hu - Contemporary Art Practitioner

Chujun Hu is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily across painting and soft sculpture. The body has remained central to her practice, functioning not only as a represented subject but also as a site through which desire, intimacy, identity and structures of looking can be examined. Her background in Graphic Design shaped her sensitivity to visual language and to the ways images influence how bodies are perceived.

 

Hu’s earlier works approached the body through psychological and symbolic narratives. Antidote (2023) explored fetishism, desire and the pressures of material culture through distorted bodily forms and recurring symbolic objects. In Flower in Mist (2024), the body became entangled with animal and organic forms, opening questions around cross-species intimacy and emotional projection. Tender Dessert (2025) turned towards self-dialogue, using the female body to explore the relationship between the conscious self, the alter ego, emotional scars and suppressed desire. Across these works, the body shifted between personal experience, fantasy and cultural construction.

 

These concerns subsequently developed into Hu’s ongoing series, Unsettled, which examines how the female body is viewed, recognised and visually consumed. The series began by questioning the expectation that the body should appear as a clear, complete and immediately legible image. Through fragmentation, overlap, covering and repeated layers of acrylic paint, bodily forms emerge and disappear across the surface. A fragment may suggest flesh, a limb or a torso before dissolving into colour, gesture and material. Recognition remains possible but temporary, interrupting the viewer’s ability to visually possess the body as a stable image.

 

Hu’s process is informed by an understanding of artistic practice as embodied and material. Movement, gesture, repetition and encounters with paint participate in the production of meaning rather than simply illustrating a predetermined image. Layering, scraping, erasure and accident allow figuration and abstraction to remain simultaneously active. Her extension of Unsettled into soft sculpture further explores the body through scale, weight and physical presence, placing the work within the same bodily and spatial field as the viewer.

 

In her current paintings, Hu develops Unsettled through landscape, vegetation and natural forms. Landscape no longer functions as a background or separate subject. Instead, body and environment become porous and interconnected: flesh may resemble vegetation, landscape may appear bodily, and a single brushstroke may belong simultaneously to figure, environment and paint.

 

Instability therefore emerges not only from making the female body difficult to recognise, but from the shifting relationships between body, landscape, material process and viewing. Changes in distance and duration allow forms to appear, collapse and return. Painting becomes a space in which seeing remains provisional, unstable and open.