UC Irvine

This thesis investigates how Chen Yifei mobilizes evolving modes of realism to stage, aestheticize, and mediate memory in the context of post-Mao China. Focusing first on Thinking About History at My Space (1979), then his later Poppy (1991) and Maids of Honor (1998), the study examines how Chen’s works transform realism from a tool of ideological narration into one of emotional and visual negotiation. In the former, realism is a psychological and spatial mode for reflecting on national trauma and historical rupture, integrating photomontage and self-portraiture to reconstruct a contemplative historical subjectivity. The later female figurative paintings reorient realism toward beauty and nostalgic desire, objectifying the female body as a curated surface for expressing cultural longing and constructing an aestheticized, consumable “Chineseness.” This paper thus sets forth Chen’s turn from historical witness to cultural entrepreneur, which reflects deeper tensions between remembrance and display, national identity and global taste. Ultimately, Chen’s realism emerges as a mutable framework—one that refracts history, gender, and ideology through artifice and allure, revealing the uneasy entanglements of memory, modernity, and commodification in the nation’s as well as the artist’s personal transitions.