Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
Cosmologies II presents a monographic project structured as a sequence of “living landscapes” at the intersection of fashion, painting, contemporary craft, and choreography. The installation assembles hybrid creations that transpose the concept of an expanding universe to the field of art-making, examining how matter and gesture shape new visual languages. As a living exhibition, it is designed to shift and reconfigure in response to different programs; three exhibitions have been realized so far.
The selection of works can also change from one iteration to the next, shaped by the time elapsed and the cycles that occur between presentations. Collaborations and invited artists are incorporated in each edition in resonance with the works. In the monographic presentation itself, synesthesia and an approach to total art are embedded in the artworks, which operate across mediums and sensory registers as an integrated whole.
© Diane Arques
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
© Charles Devoyer
Archives Box No. 2
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
© Diane Arques
Archives
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
© Charles Devoyer
On Harmonies, Galactic Movement and Stellar Variations
Tune into Nature
Paris, France
2023
© Charles Devoyer
Exhibition view
Cartography of the garment’s aura
wallpaper print
180 × 180 cm
2021
Excerpt from the thesis “The Aura of the Garment”, ENSAD, 2017
“That is why, to understand the nature of clothing, a star chart is better than a photograph, as Céline Shen has done on the basis of her thesis. Not because a garment is in the sky: the garment itself is our sky.
To contemplate the fragments of fabric, colors, and materials that we bring close to our bodies throughout our days is to practice the most radical and profane form of astrology.”
Emanuele Coccia
On Harmonies, Galactic Movement and Stellar Variations
Territory I -Aura of the garment, Linear Narratives String
Tune into Nature
Paris, France
2023
With the dancer Tove Lesterlin
© Charles Devoyer
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
Artist assistant : Valentin Robin
Clothing Design assistant :
Design Assistant : Annika Schlierler
Communication assistant : Diogo Carones
Scenography set : Julia Vercambre
Collaboration : DesignerGabriel Martinez Servili
© Kyano Creative
Silk threads, trèfle leaves jewellery, voice poem, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, 3D butterfly.
600 hours of handwork.
Paris, France
2025
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2023
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2020
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Cosmologies
Cosmologies I
Archives Box No. 1
Exhibition View
Paris, France
2020
Poplar trunk box, garment-composition, mirror and mixed materials
200 × 200 × 15 cm
“The artist proposes a redefinition of the wardrobe of the contemporary female figure through a poetic spatial framework composed of fragments drawn from an intimate and multicultural cosmology, engaging both sensory and technical dimensions.
Through an extensive assemblage of prototypes, materials, archival elements, and materialized impressions, the work generates multiple potential narratives that guide the viewer from a central point toward a broader, cosmological scale. Positioned between the referential poles of the quasar and the cabinet of curiosities, a scale‑01 archive box functions as a structuring device that articulates and organizes the space around its center.”
Curatorial text by Julien Arnaud
Archives Box No. 1
Leporellos, Archival textiles prints
Exhibition view - rear view of the archive box
Paris, France
2020
Archival textiles prints, photography
from leporellos on various media,
variable dimensions
Paris, France
2016–2020
Cosmologies II
On Harmonies, Galactic Movement and Stellar Variations
Territory IV -Aura of the garment
Tune into Nature
Paris, France
2023
With the dancer Sophie Blet
© Estielle Rylle
Acrylics, wood panels, Drone
Le Havre, France
2018
Landscape Painting is a black‑and‑white painting in which choreographic gestures are spatialized beyond the pictorial surface, enabling the emergence of an imaginal, bodily form of writing rooted in the unconscious. Through this process, the work reveals unexpected, almost divinatory landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and perception.
© 99-Other Department
Painting Replica
Printed impression on poplar
250 × 120 cm
Paris, France
2020
Documentary film
5’20”, black and white
Bruxelles, Belgium
2018
Landscape painting
Archival documentation
Le Havre, France
2018
© 99‑Other Department
Printed impression on aluminum Dibond, inverted frame, mirror
75 × 53 cm
Paris, France
2020–2021
Fine art color print, black frame, mirror
75 × 53 cm
Paris, France
2020–202
Video dance, black and white, 2’08
Brussels, Belgium
2017
After studying choreography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Céline Shen has been influenced by the writings of Gernot Böhme as well as the choreographic work of Yvonne Rainer.
Her practice engages with a range of themes, including re-enactment and transmission, originality and copying, and more broadly questions of atmosphere, vibration, and presence.
These influences are reflected throughout the artist’s projects, which coherently articulate a formally resolved practice, deeply connected to broader social concerns.
Video dance, black and white, 2’55”
Brussels, Belgium
2018
Excerpts from photographic plates of the dance solo
20’00
Brussels, Belgium
2018
An ode to Nature, this dance solo unfolds as a journey through three distinct territories, moving from the mechanical world to the organic realm, and ultimately toward the embodied incorporation of the five elements.
The work leads the viewer into sensory and cyclical worlds shaped by transformation and continuity. The dancing body emerges as a site where memory, perception, and becoming converge.
Black‑and‑white film, 5’48”
Brussels, Belgium
2017
Black‑and‑white silver gelatin photographs
Brussels, Belgium
2016–2018
This photographic journey began in Japan, following a friend in his fondness for mechanical vintage objects: household appliances, office furniture, photographic equipment. We came across a charming man in a small, secluded shop at the end of its life cycle, as if frozen in time, like the survival of a cherished past. My friend found his happiness there, and this charming Mr. Tekada, almost as happy as him, took pleasure in giving new life to his ‘remnants.’ We were essentially speaking of objects from the 1960s and 1970s, even if what we discovered led us much further back in time. Carried by this shared enthusiasm, we found ourselves enjoying the art of bargaining, something rather uncommon outside the Kansai region, around a camera whose particularity was its vertical viewfinder. In the end, I made the decision: it would be mine.
The relationship to calligraphy struck me instantly “click” through its affinity with the kakemono, unfolding in their full Japanese verticality within interior spaces. This camera, with its worn appearance, became a small companion of escape, accompanying me on my walks ... more tender, more withdrawn from the frenzy of Daido Moriyama’s Tokyo, which I deliberately avoided discovering too hastily. It corresponded to my vision of calligraphy as an intensity of feeling brought into order, disentangled from chaos. The difficulties of focusing, or rather, the rudimentary nature of its settings, allowed instinct to take over. Spontaneity seized me, renewing my approach to image-making, shortening the distance and delay between perception and capture.
Calligraphy carries the pleasure of forming the word. It also contains a sensual dimension. By carving into matter, the child produces an effect and can, at every moment, follow the progression of the trace, of each letter’s gesture. Of Chinese origin, I relate to the medium of photography in France through the eye of a calligrapher. Yet calligraphy as a whole through its relationship to printmaking, or rather through its poetic equivalence shares with photography the ability to harmonize, to set a tone, to give a place a mood, an atmosphere to those who contemplate it.
To calligraphy, I bring this possibility of manipulating the fields allowed within photographic language: playing with false redundancy, with a displacement in framing that unites images within a graphic universe where emotion is captured through overall perception within blacks and greys recalling ink wash absorbed by rice paper. By playing on the differences in the modes of presentation between photographic and calligraphic works presenting the photograph as calligraphy, within this idea of fullness (the image) emerging from the black void ... the irresistible impulse imposed by our reading of the medium invites the viewer to come closer, to look more closely at the photograph. It is indeed the photograph of a photograph, the photograph within the photograph, the photograph within calligraphy: the calligraphic egregore within the image.
In this work, I question composition and the implications involved in reading a photograph. How do format and framing increase our concentration and potentially induce a change in posture? How can notions of field and off-field be made visible through this medium? And more broadly, how can photography transcribe the question of emptiness and fullness, obscurity and clarity?