Chen Wei

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.

In The Glowing Dust Grains (2021), Chen Wei stages a scene of a pedestrian, reimagining the disregarded dust grains on the curb as a scatter of glistening gems and jewels. Against the backdrop of industrial and gentrified China, Chen Wei frequently conveys the mixed sentiments on the equally new and neglected city. Imbued with an illusory air, the image straddles the ambiguous boundaries between the familiar and the imagined.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.