Curated by Marta Papini

Opening 6 June, h 18.00

Casa Masaccio | Centre for Contemporary Art is delighted to present Imitation of Life (Imitare la vita), the first solo exhibition at an Italian public institution by Taiwanese artist Skyler Chen. Curated by Marta Papini and organised in collaboration with the gallery MASSIMODECARLO, the exhibition unsettles the traditions of Western painting through fractured forms and narrative fragments.

“Skyler Chen’s solo exhibition at Casa Masaccio, Imitation of Life, takes its title from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film (released in Italy as Lo specchio della vita), which follows a young Black woman who disowns her origins to pass as white in segregationist America. But under its glossy surface – the saturated colours, the gut-wrenching scenes – the film is asking something deeper: how the prejudices of mainstream culture can hollow out one’s sense of self, until one ends up imitating life rather than actually living it.

Passing – the attempt to conform to a socially acceptable identity at the cost of your own – runs through everything Skyler Chen makes. Drawing from his own life, his paintings explore what it means to grow up queer in a culture that leaves no room for it. Raised in Taiwan in a conservative household with a Mormon upbringing, he spent years living a double life: heterosexual in public, and behind a locked bedroom door, finally himself. A collection of gay magazines and sex toys kept the loneliness of that existence at bay – objects he kept hidden for years that now turn up proudly in his paintings, alongside references to Chinese and Asian food, bubble tea, animals, and other fragments of his world.

For this exhibition at Casa Masaccio, Chen confronts the conventions of Italian Renaissance painting on their home turf: linear perspective, proportional realism, the idea of an ordered and measurable space built around a single point of view – that of Vitruvian man, male, white, and heterosexual. A gaze that organised the world under the guise of neutrality, leaving out whatever wasn’t meant to be seen. Into this frame he introduces disruptive elements – inscriptions, incongruous details, photographic close-ups – that crack the harmony of each scene. His images look classical at first, steeped in references to fifteenth-century art history, but something in them is electric and unsettling, like the air before a storm. The tension comes from a question: what happens when that single, authoritative viewpoint is inhabited by bodies and histories it was never built to hold? When the universal subject of modernity gives way to queer, diasporic identities shaped by the very History that perspective helped construct and legitimise? The works don’t answer this – instead, they sit with it, reading as fragments of a larger story with no clear beginning or end. Each composition works like a Chinese sentence, where the meaning of each word only emerges in relation to the others – or like an illustrated rebus, a form of popular visual culture that, curiously, never really caught on anywhere but Italy.

As in Sirk’s films, excess – visual, compositional, symbolic – becomes a critical language. Chen stages a fiction where figures are naked, jeans around their ankles, in office clothes or balaclavas, all at once; dressed in masculine or feminine clothing yet their gender unreadable, their surroundings equally so, everything washed in the same orange-yellow light of a sunset whose source is never quite visible. The effect this coexistence of opposites produces is something close to what Susan Sontag called the sensibility of camp – in her Notes on “Camp” (1964): “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre”. Every figure and every setting in Chen’s paintings is performing something, in a world where nothing is what it seems. What was once the painful, coercive experience of passing – having to be someone you’re not – turns here into the freedom to be someone different every day, through an identity that is fluid and ever-shifting. An aesthetics of artifice that isn’t decorative but structural: it refuses what gets called “natural” and makes the performance its own. The title Imitation of Life, then, becomes a way of reading the image itself – as a space of tension between what’s shown and what’s hidden, between the norm and what falls outside it, between an identity imposed and one still becoming.” (Marta Papini)

Skyler Chen was born in 1982 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and lives and works in Rotterdam.

Chen’s paintings blend classicism and modernity, creating intimate and quietly provocative scenes that move between traditional Taiwanese iconography and American commercial imagery. His compositions are populated by enigmatic figures in familiar settings – surrounded by erotic magazines, dumplings, fresh fruit, birds – each object carrying a symbolic weight that speaks to memory, desire, and identity. Growing up with undiagnosed dyslexia, Chen found in painting a way to communicate with the world; the canvas became both a means of expression and a space for healing.

At the heart of his practice is an exploration of queer Asian identity – what it means to exist as a queer person within a conservative culture, and how that experience shapes the way one sees and is seen. His figures are detached and still, deeply contemporary yet somehow timeless, conveying one of the defining feelings of our moment: aloneness.

Chen’s work is held in significant public collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; X Museum, Beijing; the George Economou Collection, Athens; the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Florida; and the Forbes Collection, New York. In 2025 he was included in the 14th edition of the Taipei Biennial, held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Marta Papini is an independent curator. Since 2023, she has been the Artistic Director and Curator of Radis, a four-year public art project promoted by Fondazione Arte CRT, and from the 2026 edition onward she curates the Photography section of Arte Fiera.
In 2025, she co-curated Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible with Massimiliano Gioni and Daniel Birnbaum, a project by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi at Palazzo Morando in Milan. She was Associate Curator of Dimanche Sans Fin at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (2025), alongside Maurizio Cattelan and Chiara Parisi, Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Together with Lorenzo Giusti, she served as Associate Curator of the ninth edition of Biennale Gherdëina, The Marmots’ Parliament (2024), and of Thinking Like a Mountain (2024–2026), a project by GAMeC Bergamo. In 2022, she was Artistic Coordinator of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. She has co-curated and contributed to the organization of exhibitions including Lonely Are All Bridges. Birgit Jürgenssen and Cinzia Ruggeri at Fondazione ICA Milano (2025) and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna (2021); The Magical World, the Italian Pavilion at the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2017), curated by Cecilia Alemani; and The Artist is Present at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018), with Maurizio Cattelan.
She was a member of the selection committee for the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE 2026 and the Future Generation Art Prize 2024.

Press kit: bit.ly/4naVuOs

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