Chen Wei
Chen Wei constructs personal narratives using found objects, fabricated props and staged scenes, all of which are meticulously constructed and assembled inside his studio. Evoking recurring motifs, memories and dreams, every image is a fiction and a story in itself. In the fictional scenes of objects, interiors and nocturnal cityscapes, Chen exposes the psychological and socio-political characters of contemporary China: collective yearning for betterment, disillusionment of consumerist desires, and a nostalgia for a haphazardly erased past. Besides photography, Chen also creates multi-media installations that act as an extension of his studio practice; his LED sculptures are particularly reminiscent of urban living experiences.
Chen’s recent solo exhibitions include “Make me illusory” at West Bund Museum (Shanghai, 2021); “The Last Night” at Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2021); “Good Night” at HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2021); “Chen Wei: The Club” at Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne, 2017); “Noon Club” at JNBY Foundation (Hangzhou, 2016) and “Chen Wei: In the Waves” at K11 chi art museum (Shanghai, 2015). Chen has also participated in group exhibitions at He Art Museum (Guangdong, 2022); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, 2020); Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, (Munich, 2020); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2019); Asia Society Texas Center (Houston, 2016); Museum Folkwang (Essen, 2015); Stavanger Art Museum (Stavanger, 2014); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2013) and Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2006).
Chen currently lives and works in Beijing.
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How about dancing? / 2022
In Chen Wei’s How about dancing (2022), a lonesome disco ball centered in a deserted corner radiates light atop an elongated basketball net reminiscent of uncut hair during extended quarantines. Chen’s studio staged tableau vivant mirrors the way that sporting facilities were closed off in the course of covid lockdowns in China, restricting people from social gatherings. Chen covers the net with a disco ball, humorously and playfully undermining the incessant anxieties felt by many amidst these draconian measures.
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Brilliantly Lit Lights / 2021
The will for order dances in the carefully choreographed chaos of urban life. Brilliantly Lit Lights / H.K. (2021) is a sculpture of a life-size malfunctioning streetlamp emanating irregular flashing lights in random rhythms and amplitude. With its sensuous curves following distinct state-sanctioned aesthetics, these lights are modelled after common streetlamps, called zhong hua (Chinese) lamps.
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New City / 2013-ongoing
More intimate than landscapes and grander than still lives, the artist situates these settings between fiction and reality, artifacts and fragments. This is an experience that all city dwellers share as a collective, infused with dreamscape, glitches, afterimages, and memory traces. They form a New City that refuses to be abstracted, resolutely holding on to the object and the experience itself. Articulating a nostalgia that hesitates to find a place in the present and bidding farewell to a sentimental vision of the past, Chen Wei foresees the building of a new city.
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Curtain / 2020
The image, New Buildings, depicts a window view from the interior, as glistening lights are emitted and reflected from new buildings on the outside, illuminating the foggy and smoggy light. These iridescent lights is the endless pulsation of the city.
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Coins / 2017
A pair of hands, anachronistic, symbolically holding coins and light. This work comprises the Park Coins Series. In the last decades of the 20th century, public sculptures in this style populates cities and parks, symbolizing the collective wish for betterment and happiness.
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Mushroom and Tree / 2016
Chen Wei fabricates an image of satellites strewn across an abandoned construction site, starkly lit in a nocturnal cyberpunk glow; the vacant landscape appears to be poetically yet disturbingly locked in time. Satellite dishes, previously a communication and entertainment necessity for construction workers, are now deemed redundant in the age of smartphones. Chen exposes the aftermath of rapid industrialisation and proliferating economic growth as waste and excess reproduce like mushrooms in abundance, a reflection of the country’s consumerist and materialist aspirations.
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Dark Mosaics / 2016
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Trouble / 2018
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dance / club / 2013-2020
Meticulously constructed and staged, often in the interior of his studio, Chen Wei’s photographic works resemble less a still life than a vacated tableau vivant, marked by a dramatic and cinematic quality. Chen’s dance / club series originates from the artist’s distrust and doubt of the psychical state of “ecstasy”. By restaging the psychedelic, almost apocalyptic, mis-en-scène of the nightclub, Chen restores a certain space between the real and the virtual, where the mechanism and destination of “ecstasy” are made legible again. Under the rapid current of modernisation and urbanisation, imported music and pop dance culture cease to be the site of sustenance and consolation for the individual to assert its existence and values; the performativity of the reinterpretation of dance reemerges under this dysfunction. Chen utilises an artificial and unstable spatial narrative to capture the collective anxiety and inquietude common in modern life.
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Early Works / Early Works
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Press
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Video
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