"It doesn't matter what you say in the city you live in, but the radiance of your paroles."

Growing up in the era of China's economic expansion, He An's works span many art media, including installation, sculpture, and photography. At times, he integrates industrial materials to create a sensory narrative installation, reflecting the physical and psychological aspects of China's urbanization. Lightboxes, advertising characters, neon signs, concrete, and other urban symbols are abstracted into the concise artistic language. The spaces engendered from architecture or emotions become places of emotional and imaginative experience. In his practice of exploring the truth of urban emotions, He An always invested his most sincere, passionate, violent, and romantic feeling.

In 2000, for his first formal work of art, He An used redlight boxes to create a giant line of text, which adopts a popular online phrase "Thinking of you, please contact me" with the artist’s phone number included in it. The work stands on the streets of Shenzhen, which introduced private desire into public space, creating a scarce yet direct line of communication in contemporary society. People gaze at the work and see a simple, no-strings-attached way of exchange that lifts the pressures off urban life and complex interpersonal relationships. As a result, the artist received phone calls from hundreds of strangers across the country.

Light and text are two very consistent elements in He An's work. In China's urbanization, neon signs and lightboxes have become ubiquitous in the Chinese urban landscape. When night falls, their cheap theatricality becomes visible. In these texts, we seem to get a clearer sense of the artist's personal feelings and thoughts. It can be said that while these works commemorate the artist's personal experience, they also show his reflection on the relationship between modern people and the urban environment.

The Dark Side of the Moon is inspired by the massive billboard standing off the highway, where steel and iron sheets are rolled into a flashlight-like cylinder, and 16 blinding industrial lights emanate inward from both ends of the cylinder, blocking it with an intense, antagonistic beam of light. The light that should radiate outward turns inward, and its existence is also subjected to self-scrutiny and questioning because of its distortion.

In the work I hate to own and be owned, my moment of purity is better than your lifetime of lies, He An took the outlines of two Chinese characters from the movie "The English Patient" and "Natural Born Killers" respectively, and formed a continuous and twisted line of negatives - the contour of characters and the negative space of the city. In the artist’s own words, "It doesn't matter what you say in the city you live in, but the radiance of your paroles."

The 2018 He An solo exhibition "Jade Branch" at the Tang Contemporary Art Center in Beijing extends the artist's improvising or intervening in space to adopt raw architectural materials. "Jade Branch" builds a temporary structure with a steel frame, allowing viewers to walk into the construct while listening to the sound of water droplets, and gazing at the deliberately created spots of light. He An appropriates the experience of the underclass to celebrate a tragic romance, while an aria echo between the thin columns.

For the exhibition, "Advent," the first contemporary art group exhibition in Qianshao Bay, Chongming Island, Shanghai, He An's sculpture Untitled presented a superposition of several large cut concrete slabs, the circular missing surface of which resembles a bitten cheese or a cut Taihu Lake stone, but in fact are the search of one concrete slab for the next, a deterministic geometry of nature. The morphological search for results alludes to the mathematical relationships and a monument composed of traces.

He An

Born in Wuhan in 1970, He An now lives and works in Beijing.

He An is one of China’s foremost conceptual artists with a practice that includes installation, sculpture, photography and performance. His works largely reflect the physical and psychological emotional shock brought about by dramatic changes in Chinese cities. Combining light-boxes, billboards, neon lights and other materials, He An turns urban symbols into a new artistic language.

He An’s works have already been exhibited in galleries and institutions including Tate Liverpool, Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, London’s Saatchi Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) etc.