Énormément Bizarre, La collection Jean Chatelus, donation de la fondation Antoine de Galbert

Ouyang Chun’s work “Day of Atonement” is featured in the Jean Chatelus Collection exhibition “Énormément Bizarre” at the Centre Pompidou and has been acquired as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

The idea for this piece—and all its materials—came from the now-demolished residential buildings of Xi’an University of Technology, where Ouyang Chun lived with his parents as a teenager. Between May 2017 and March 2018, he returned to Xi’an three times to collect materials before the buildings were torn down. Having grown up there, he spent over two months collecting remnants left behind by neighbors after they moved out, painstakingly transporting these discarded furniture and objects piece by piece with unwavering dedication. In total, he amassed an astonishing 12 tons of objects. No one questioned or stopped him—his return to the place where he was raised felt as natural as dusting off old furniture. The memories remained intact, just as they always had, and no one found it out of place.

Ouyang Chun reconstructed these elements and scenes, many of which had remained untouched since the 1970s and 1980s. He carefully arranged objects long forgotten yet deeply familiar, creating an atmosphere where, as he describes, “the air is thick with dust that still holds life.” Through these discarded objects, bearing the imprints of ordinary lives, he revisited his childhood memories as a mischievous boy in the residential buildings and paid tribute to a generation of people who were once displaced across the country. Like reconstructing an island of collective memory, he sought to rediscover the long-lost, unrestrained innocence buried within these abandoned fragments of the past.