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.
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
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...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
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...
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...
Rowland’s minimal installations require a focus not on the objects themselves, but on the conditions of their creation, use, and distribution...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
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...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria...