Art Within Reach

Artist / Chen Wei

Chen Wei was born in Zhejiang in 1980, lives and works in Beijing. Initially a sound and performance artist, Chen Wei's interest developed into photo, video and installation art. Staged mise-en-scène and scenario re-enacting are often seen in Chen Wei’s photography. In recent years, he has been working on the combination of stage setting and multi-media installation as an on-site extension in his work.

Chen Wei considered that his method of work is the process of building a stage. Cutting through the neglected parts of life from the perspective of images, isolate them from their original environment and make them visible.

Chen Wei's early works tended to depict absurd things and were fascinated by the bizarre aspects of life. But during the creative process, he gradually shifted his focus to the people and environment around him, hoping to extract a moment or group from real life that everyone is accustomed  but has not truly paid attention to.

Chen Wei's creations are often presented in photography through stage installations and situational reengineering. And "light" is an indispensable medium in his photography setting. During photography, the "light" used by the artist deliberately forms a eerie reconstruction scene with a hazy filter, creating a hidden atmosphere rendering that allows the audience to naturally feel the emotional expression in the work, while keeping distance due to its unreasonable structure.

A series of "New City" urban landscape photography works are created by artists as he wandered and observed lonely city streets in the dark. The strange urban landscape is built inside the artist's studio, resembling the popular dance hall aesthetics in China. The New City project records the current state of the city by redefining the traces left in the urbanization process, demolishing the remaining section of stairs, and laying half of the floor tiles, forming the most authentic side of the city. Especially in certain scenes, the black screen retains traces of the stage, and the preservation of the "stage sense" confuses the relationship between reality and falsehood, causing audience to switch between life and the stage.

Continuing his previous observations of cities, he reflects on the changes in lifestyle in the digital age process. When people face the obstruction of communication space, do individuals living behind screens still need to have intimate relationships and real interactions? What role does the immediacy and zero distance, which are infinitely revered in the digital age, play? The contradictory and blocked visual imagery in The Island suggests that in the global public health situation, the frequency of digital socializing is continuously increasing and becoming a reasonable excuse for people to avoid others. New Advertising freezes the act of changing advertisements at night into a static image through photos, in order to provoke and resist this extended static state.

Exhibitions

Recent exhibitions include: Chen Wei: Make Me Illusory, West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2021); Chen Wei: Good Night, HOW Art Museum, Shanghai (2021); Chen Wei: Goodbye, ShanghART, Shanghai (2019); Chen Wei: Drifting Along, Büro Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2019); Chen Wei: Where Are You Going Tonight, chi K11 artspace, Guangzhou (2018); Chen Wei: Falling Light, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich, Germany (2018); Witness, Chen Wei etc., Pilar Corrias, London, U.K. (2018); The Club, Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, Australia (2017); Noon Club, programmed by Francesco Bonami, JNBY Art Space, Hangzhou (2016); In The Waves, chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2015), The Stars in the Night Sky are Innumerable, Australia China Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia (2014) etc.

Awards

Chen Wei was awarded the Asia Pacific Photography Prize in 2011, and was a nominee of the Prudential Eye Awards for Contemporary Asian Art in 2015, he was awarded the Golden Panda Photography Art Award in 2023.

This article is sourced from the official website of ShanghART.