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 heavy texturing and a nostalgic palette, converting the raw digital image into a final product with an exceptional sense of physicality. Online Encyclopedia: Reality, takes an error message from the website Flickr—a error message reading “This Photo Is Currently Unavailable”—and gives it the texture of a physical artefact. Chen Shijun sources the images in his works from keyword searches on internet search engines, converting the raw image into an oil painting so heavily weathered it seems to bear the mark of time itself.

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.