Chen Wei

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.

Trouble #18032 is an LED lighting installation inspired by aging and faulty LED advertising screens commonly found in Chinese cities. With glitches and flashes, a hackneyed Chinese expression “Tonight happy together – let’s drink until we drop!” flows through the screen intermittently. Despite the generic, consumerist and hedonistic origin of the texts, the artwork conveys a certain promise of happiness, which it reintroduces and recirculates as essential threads of our urban social fabric.

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.

In Entrance of the Garden (2009), overgrown vegetation boisterously blocks the door from the outside. An ever-present motif in Chen’s work, the sense of abandonment exposes the psychological and socio-political characters of contemporary China: collective yearning for betterment, disillusionment of urbanisation, and the powerlessness of individuals against systemic forces.