A Little Bit More Virtual Than Reality, A Little Bit Warmer than Craziness, A Little Bit Whiter Than Darkness, A Little Bit Longer than A heavy Sigh
2012 - Photography (Photography)
30H x 47W inches
Xiaoyun Chen
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image. Near his studio, Chen often walks over fallen branches in late autumn and sense their existence. Thus, his placing them in diverse contexts builds a “narrative Ariadne’s thread” where the branches become “the language of things” intertextually cohering his oeuvre. Each branch provokes a new instinctual art making process without assigning too much meaning. In this particular work, tree branches are covered in black paint that resembles petroleum in thick calligraphic splatters. Here, metaphors of artifice and reality, as well as wistful emotions of transient existence, are loosely gestured through the paint over tree branch, forming a poetics of nature akin to the airs of ancient Chinese poetic anthologies that Hangzhou artists often reference.
Chen Xiaoyun studied ink painting at the Chinese Academy of Arts and lived as a writer in Suzhou before becoming part of the Hangzhou video art community. Chen’s works stages scenes of everyday life with elements of the strange and the absurd in order to explore existentialist themes through narratives of visual linearity. Chen is drawn to nighttime scenes of ambiguity, making use of shadows and silhouettes in concert with simple plots and fixed scenery to reconcile disjuncture in gazes and assert connections between the filmic eye and reality.
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