Chen Yan has been painting on the silver bromides films for the past few years. Carving knives replaced her pens and brushes, the artist takes away the silver bromides, revealing images from negative spaces just as light penetrates the darkness. Each cut is the memory of time, the proof of existence, and the present in which we live. The creation process resembles that of decoding, expecting objects to be enlightened from within with every scratch.
Silver bromide film is the product of industrialization; as a photographic medium, it has completed its historical missions and is fading out of the nowadays modern world. Artwork and its medium are a significant issue in the philosophy of art; therefore, technological developments influence artistic concepts and the creative process itself in such allegedly way. Moreover, the relationship between such events and nature itself affects the general consciousness and understanding of the possibility of unpredictable events, unexpected crises, and the leverage of global change that has profoundly affected the artist's perception. The work entitled "Historical Marks of Nature" is based on the thoughts mentioned above, attempting to imitate Song Dynasty's paintings with images of Chinese landscapes. This art piece, composed of the black as white scratches, intertwined between the tangible and intangible, guided by the light-breaking process and embedded in chaos, tries to interpret the relationship between heaven, earth, and human with order and density of the dark matter.