Chen Shijun's distinctive painting style mediates between digital and physical images. The Online Encyclopedia series, for example, takes prosaic images found while browsing online as its source material, and then interprets it through through heavy texturing and a nostalgic palette, converting the raw digital image into a final product with an exceptional sense of physicality. Online Encyclopedia: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, takes an image of a water droplet and its ripples, the sort of commercial photograph that comes preinstalled as a background image on many computers, as its point of departure. The perfect unbroken color fields of the original become wrinkled and worn, while an overlaid http address suggests a sense of artificiality.

A word from The Artist

Internet is an important component of the information society. It has been penetrating the contemporary social mass, quietly changing our way of living and thinking, possibly changing the world in a seeable future. Internet is not only my major means of accessing to information, but also, to a certain extent, a way of comprehending the world. Therefore, I based my creation on the randomly retrieved images from Baidu, Google after typing in certain keywords, during which the abstract texts have been converted into the corresponding visual images. Furthermore, in such process of mutual referencing, a certain relation between the words and images, that may otherwise have little or no relevance with one another, has been established. Perhaps this can serve as a new angle to perceive the relations between images and times.