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.” For Ink Diary , Chen recorded his daily life and impressions within a rapidly-changing urban setting in ink wash paintings which he then turned into an animated film. The complex result of this simple process is both highly innovative and reflective of modernization.
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.
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
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...
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...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...