Exhibition: Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple

Based between Karlsruhe and Hangzhou, artist Hangyan Chen exhibits Das ist ein Kinderspiel, not an Apple at Foto Forum. The work is an intimate yet profoundly contemporary exploration of identity, language, and cultural perception. Rooted in her experience of living between Germany and China, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on the shifting ways in which place, memory, and language shape our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

Hangyan Chen works across photography, video, performance, and artist publications. She examines in a sensitive yet profound way the quiet intricacies of everyday life, bringing into view overlooked spaces, obscured narratives, and the subtle frictions that arise between different cultural and linguistic realities.

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026

Photography occupies a central position within Chen’s artistic practice. Her lens directs toward the peripheral landscapes of the urban environment—spaces that remain visible yet largely unnoticed. Receiving her familiar surroundings in both Germany and China through the altered perspective of distance and migration, she documents cities’ marginal spaces alongside the quiet, often unseen rhythms.

Situated between intimacy and displacement, Chen’s work investigates how migration, language, and cultural mobility transform perception itself. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, her practice understands it as an ongoing process of negotiation, continuously reshaped through movement across linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries.

Throughout the exhibition, Chen weaves an intricate constellation of temporalities in which people, objects, places, and memories intersect across parallel narratives. Each fragment, be it photography, moving image, or printed matter emerges as an autonomous yet interconnected point of view, oscillating between personal recollection and collective experience. Her gaze remains suspended between that of an insider and an outsider, revealing how perception is fundamentally altered by the experience of inhabiting more than one cultural world.

Through a practice that is at once poetic and critically attentive, Hangyan Chen uncovers the political resonance embedded in ordinary encounters, opening a space where memory, language, and belonging remain in continual dialogue.

Susanne Kriemann

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026

Hangyan Chen

Artist and researcher currently living and working in Karlsruhe, Germany. Working across photography, moving image, installation, publishing, and artist’s books, her practice attends to what is often overlooked, displaced, or left at the margins of perception.

Beginning with everyday spaces, neglected corners, found objects, scanned documents, archival images, and recurring details from her surroundings, she explores how meaning emerges through processes of observation, collection, and recontextualisation. Informed in part by her experience of living across German and Chinese linguistic and cultural contexts, her work considers how shifts in language and place can make the ordinary appear unfamiliar, bringing peripheral details and less visible relationships into focus.

Through these fragmentary materials, her work brings disparate elements into relation, allowing less visible histories, traces, and forms of experience to emerge.

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026

Hangyan Chen – Das ist ein Kinderspiel, Not an Apple, Foto Forum Open Call — Selected Artist 2025, Bolzano/Bozen (Italy), 2026