Chen Wei
Entrance
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Chen Wei
b. 1980, Zhejiang province, China
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.
Chen’s recent solo exhibitions include “Where Are You Going Tonight” (chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, China,2018); “Chen Wei: The Club” (Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, 2017); “Noon Club” (JNBY Foundation, Hangzhou, 2016) and “Chen Wei: In the Waves” (K11 chi art museum, Shanghai, 2015). Group exhibitions in which Chen has participated include “Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future” (Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2019); “We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art” (Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, USA, 2016); “CHINA 8 – Works in Progress” (Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, 2015); “Performance and Imagination: Chinese Photography 1911–2014” (Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway, 2014); “ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice” (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013); “The 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale” (Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, 2006). Chen is the recipient of the Asia Pacific Photography Prize at SH Contemporary in 2011. Chen’s works is collected by Rubell Family Collection (USA); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Switzerland) and White Rabbit Contemporary Art Collection (Australia).
Chen currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
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Anonymous Society for Magick / 2016 - 2020
Chen Wei constructs meticulously staged scenes that either capture or mimic specific moments in reality, telling a story of the social reality in contemporary China, presenting it as photographs and installation. Exposing the collective psychology of contemporary Chinese citizens, they share the mutual desire of betterment individually and nationally. This materialism has resulted in a huge abundance of non-degradable consumer products left in the city, which are usually left neglected and remained as they are. Chen reimagines such found objects and, through careful reconstruction, builds a new scene resembling common dreams, finding a place within our memory, creating fiction from true stories. Perhaps, like the theatrical lights and props in a magic stage, the materialist façade of a prosperous economy creates tactics of diversion from ideological struggles to the other social strife in contemporary China.
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Trouble #18032 / 2018
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.
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dance / club / 2013-2015
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
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.
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Other Exhibition
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Media Coverage
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Media Coverage
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