Collective Memories: Beijing Hotel

2007 - Painting (Painting)

Chen Shaoxiong

location: Beijing
location: Guangzhou, China
year born: 1962
gender: male
nationality: Chinese
home town: Shantou, Guangdong Province, China

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective. This “return to origin” reveals an interesting critical reflection on the interactive relation between outside change and internal reflection, and the possibility for more experimental approaches that revive “traditional media.” Chen’s series Collective Memories depicts some of the most important architectural works and urban sites in modern Chinese society, especially those related to the history of revolutions. Instead of reproducing the images himself, Chen invited the public to participate in their making by using their fingers to paint directly on the paper or canvas. The resulting paintings made from hundreds of individual thumbprints embody and metaphorize the fragility and uncertain future of collective memories in a time of rapid urban expansion and globalization.


Chen Shaoxiong, was a founding member—along with Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui (and later Xu Tan)—of the well-known artist collective “Big Tail Elephant” which arose in response to the rapid urbanization od Guangzhou in the early 1990s. The group created a large body of multimedia work including performance, photography, video, installation, and paintings. In his solo work, Chen focuses his efforts on the new forms of perception of urban visions and life imposed by the age of information and global travel. Using both new media, like photography and video, and more traditional forms like painting, he produces ironic and uncanny images of a new reality and its constant negotiation between reality and fiction, memory and imagination, past, present and future.


Colors:



Related works sharing similar palette

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam
© » BROOKLYN STREET ART

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY In the shifting culturescapes of urban contemporary art, STRAAT Museum’s latest exhibition, “Moniker: An Origin Story,” emerges as a poignant narrative that bridges the transient heritage of hobo monikers with the vibrant pulse of today’s street art scene...

Curator Lauren Haynes Revisits a 1966 Profile of Spiral, Pioneering Black Art Collective
© » ARTNEWS RETROSPECTIVE

Curator Lauren Haynes Revisits ARTnews’s 1966 Profile of Spiral Group – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All November 4, 2020 5:15pm ©ARTnews I n 1963, 14 Black artists in New York formed the Spiral group...

Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch
© » THE RE:ART

Lea Rasovszky - Dig the Inbetween - The re:art Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch On March 17th, 2017, Lea Rasovszky launched her book Dig the Inbetween, a collaboration with graphic designer Larisa Sitar and curator and art critic Diana Marincu , together with a one-night only exhibition at Mobius Gallery in Bucharest...

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Are Bringing Their Art Collection to the Brooklyn Museum
© » OBSERVER

Brooklyn Museum to Exhibit Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Art Collection | Observer Singer Alicia Keys and hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz aren’t only a power couple in the world of music...

ArtsEquator’s Top 10 Picks at the Performing Arts Meeting 2019
© » ARTS EQUATOR

ArtsEquator's Top 10 Picks at the Performing Arts Meeting 2019 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles José Maceda, Cassettes 100, 1971, Photo by Nathaniel Gutierrez, Courtesy of UP Center for Ethnomusicology and Ringo Bunoan January 10, 2019 Established in 1995, the Tokyo Performing Arts Market (TPAM) was created to be a platform to network Japanese artists with producers and funders...

Idir
© » KADIST

Carole Douillard & Babette Mangolte

2018

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria...

Shadows V, Set of 3
© » KADIST

Charles Gaines

1980

To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...

Constituent
© » KADIST

Cameron Rowland

2014

Rowland’s minimal installations require a focus not on the objects themselves, but on the conditions of their creation, use, and distribution...

Untitled (Details from fictional realities)
© » KADIST

Matt Mullican

2018

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation...

Transgression, triggers, and the thousand cuts of “Blunt Knife”
© » ARTS EQUATOR

Transgression, triggers, and the thousand cuts of “Blunt Knife” | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of the artist June 25, 2019 By Corrie Tan (2,700 words, 13 -minute read) Content Warning: Mentions of a sexual relationship involving a teenager This response contains major spoilers for Blunt Knife by Eng Kai Er and A Doll’s House by Theatre of Europe...

Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass
© » SLASH PARIS

Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Galerie Bigaignon — Exposition — Slash Paris Connexion Newsletter Twitter Facebook Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass — Galerie Bigaignon — Exposition — Slash Paris Français English Accueil Événements Artistes Lieux Magazine Vidéos Retour Morvarid K — This too Shall Pass Exposition Photographie Vue de l’exposition Morvarid K, This too Shall Pass, 2023 © D...

Freeway Series
© » KADIST

Catherine Opie

1994

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) (1953) and It for Others (2013)
© » KADIST

6pm – Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) 7pm – It for Others (2013) The second in a monthly series of double features exploring the relationship between cinema and contemporary video and performance art, Kadist screens Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ 1953 film, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) (1953) and Duncan Campbell’s Turner Prize -winning film It for Others (2013)...

Unknown Unknown
© » KADIST

A.K. Burns

2016

In a 2002 Pentagon press conference, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed a question about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction with an unforgettable evasion: there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, the latter being the most precarious...

The Anamorphic Sculptures of Thomas Medicus
© » HIGH FRUCTOSE

The illusionary works of Thomas Medicus include "What It Is Like to Be," an anamorphic sculpture consisting of 144 hand-painted strips of glass that reveal new images when turned...

Aung Myint charity exhibition by Connecting Myanmar
© » ARTOMITY

Aung Myint charity exhibition by Connecting Myanmar – ARTOMITY 藝源 Aung Myint charity exhibition Feb 2 – May 31, 2024 artsy.net connectingmyanmar.com Connecting Myanmar (a registered charity in Hong Kong) is proud to present a charity exhibition of the legendary Myanmar artist Aung Myint’s works...

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time-Traveling Lens
© » HYPERALLERGIC

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time-Traveling Lens Skip to content Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Lake Superior, Cascade River" (1995), gelatin silver print (all photos AX Mina/Hyperallergic) LONDON — The first image at the Hayward Gallery’s show of work by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is a pair of upright apes walking through a volcanic landscape...

Charles Baudelaire
© » KADIST

Mary Reid Kelley

2015

Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...

Postponed: Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Natalia Brizuela
© » KADIST

Postponed: Curator Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese, Thursday, October 19, 2023, 5–6 pm The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of California, Berkeley: 2334 Bowditch St, Berkeley, CA 94720 Curator Yina Jiménez Suriel will discuss her curatorial process and research project la historia de las montañas (the history of the mountains) , which examines emancipation, perceptual systems beyond the human, and the creation of new imaginaries outside/beyond Western structures...