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.
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...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
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...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
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...
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...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...