About

Guosen Chen is a writer, photographer, and translator. Born in Shandong, he has since lived in Chengdu and Shanghai.

He is a PhD candidate in the philosophy of art at Fudan University, where he studies under Prof. Shen Yubing. His research focuses on photography theory, phenomenological aesthetics, and contemporary visual culture. His dissertation, "Hermes' Messages: Photography After Artificial Intelligence," is in progress. He has received the China National Scholarship twice (2025, 2026).

Together with a friend, he co-founded Photography Theory Shelter, an open community for the study of photography theory that now brings together nearly 1,000 members. He has designed and taught over 100 sessions of coursework on photographic theory, visual culture, and media philosophy for the community. In recent years, he has been invited to participate in scholarly conversations and exchanges with Stephen Shore, Fred Ritchin, Jeff Wall, Charlotte Cotton, David Campany, and Thomas Ruff, among others.

His academic writing has appeared in Photography and Culture, Twenty-First Century, the Journal of Nanjing Arts Institute (Fine Arts & Design), Studies of Culture and Art, Contemporary Artists, and Chinese Photography, among other Chinese- and English-language journals. He has also contributed to The Journal of History and Philosophy of Art (The Commercial Press), Études de philosophie française (Shanghai People's Publishing House), and the exhibition catalogue for Stephen Shore: The Enduring Present (Zhejiang Photography Publishing House). His subjects range across the ontology of photography, the tableau form in contemporary art photography, the ethics of representing atrocity images, and Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics of painting. His translations include Pamela M. Lee's Think Tank Aesthetics (co-translation) and Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive," among other texts in photography theory.

Before turning to philosophy, he studied creative writing under Wang Anyi, Wang Hongtu, and others in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, where he received his MFA. His novella Rousseau is collected in the graduation anthology If There Is an Abyss (Shanghai People's Publishing House).