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THEME: BLUE

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.

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  • Online Encyclopedia: True Facts
  • Chen Shijun (b. 1982) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in neighboring Chongqing for his high school, college, and post-graduate education. Deeply steeped in the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's long and proud oil painting tradition, Chen Shijun developed a style of painting that mediates between digital and physical images while studying at the academy: “Online Encyclopedia: The Real Facts,” for example, 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. The internet and its digital realities are a constant presence in his work; the artist describes the internet as not just a portal of information, but the predominant lens through which he perceives the outside world. Recently graduated, Chen Shijun has begun exhibiting on a modest scale within China, his most notable exhibition being “The Way of the Image,” a two-person exhibition with his contemporary Wang Chunli, with whom Chen Shijun shares an alma mater and a studio.

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    CHEN Shijun 陈世君
$35.00
He Jian is notable for his amalgamation of ancient and contemporary Chinese culture. Rather than painting in oil like most of his contemporaries, he uses rice paper, dry pigment, and binder as his media. He strategically layers and manipulates his paints to take on the timeworn quality of the 14th century Yuan Dynasty frescoes at the Yong Le Temple in Shanxi Province. He Jian uses this distinctive new-old, antiquated style to present a wide range of quotidian subject matter. Although many of his works portray figural groups engaged in activities characteristic of modern Chinese life, in this series He Jian directs his focus towards utilitarian objects that signaled China’s shift towards a consumer culture. The cheap electronics that have dominated Chinese manufacturing in the past two decades have all but obliterated use of the abacus, a traditional Asian counting tool. But it was only as recently as the 1990s when virtually every shopkeeper in the mainland used one. In a short span of time, the abacus has already become a forgotten object, and both He Jian's stylistics and subject matter are informed by this nostalgia.

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  • Abacus
  • He Jian (b. 1978) was born in Guang Yuan, Sichuan province, and graduated from oil painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His distinctive style is based on the frescoes of Yongle temple in Shanxi province. In the "Mass Consumption" series, begun in 1999, He Jian utilizes traditional modeling methods, particularly those of the hands and feet depicted in those centuries-old frescoes, to create a sharp satire of modern life. He Jian's figures smoke, gamble, drink, and sing at karaoke parlors in vulgar displays of contemporary wealth and excess, but do so in the visual vernacular of ancient China, their stylized bodies instantly recognizable to students of traditional Chinese art history.

    For his witty visual combination of ancient and contemporary, He Jian graduated with distinction, and continued on as a lecturer in the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Since graduating, He Jian has received increasing attention from the international art world, participating in many shows in China and abroad, as well as signing with a well-known gallery. Because his practice and education have been so firmly rooted in Sichuan, he is frequently exhibited with his Sichuan-based contemporaries, together considered the new face of the Sichuan school of painting.

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    HE Jian 何剑
$35.00
So abstracted is this painting that it is only its title that hints at its original source: The Experience of Reading Vision: Basin No. 11, suggesting that the canvas of light and dark blues depicts a common, every day object, a trough that collects rainwater. Yet how did an image of a phyiscal, tangible, identifiable object become duo-toned abstraction? In order to create the effect, Wang Chunli Select images from daily life, and take pictures for them. The process is an act of reduction, of creating visually manifested difference between the original and its facsimile. Wang Chunli then paints the image that results, a means of both reconstructing the image and tracing preserving the emotional qualities of its degenerative.

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  • Exponential Repetitions of Visual Readings: Basin No. 11
  • Wang Chunli (b.1982) was born in Chongqing. He is a recent graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he attended high school, and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Like Chen Shijun, with whom he shares a studio, Wang Chunli studied oil painting, and his practice absorbs much from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's storied oil painting tradition. Wang Chunli uses the medium to mediate between digital and physical image-making proceses. The “Exponential Repitition of Visual Readings” series, for example, makes abstractions from images sourced online, such as an image of American president Barack Obama: in order to create the final work, Wang photographs the image, and then photographs the image of that image. The process is repeated seemingly endlessly, like a hall of mirrors, resulting in a final image of stark colors and forms, boiled down to the essential, abstract ghost-like structures of the original. Recently graduated, Wang Chunli has only recently begun showing, mostly in domestic group exhibitions with many of his young Chongqing peers.

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    WANG Chunli 王春黎
$35.00
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.

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  • Online Encyclopedia: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
  • Chen Shijun (b. 1982) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in neighboring Chongqing for his high school, college, and post-graduate education. Deeply steeped in the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's long and proud oil painting tradition, Chen Shijun developed a style of painting that mediates between digital and physical images while studying at the academy: “Online Encyclopedia: The Real Facts,” for example, 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. The internet and its digital realities are a constant presence in his work; the artist describes the internet as not just a portal of information, but the predominant lens through which he perceives the outside world. Recently graduated, Chen Shijun has begun exhibiting on a modest scale within China, his most notable exhibition being “The Way of the Image,” a two-person exhibition with his contemporary Wang Chunli, with whom Chen Shijun shares an alma mater and a studio.

    Click on the artist's name for more information
    CHEN Shijun 陈世君
$35.00
The youthful figures from Exponential Repetitions of Visual Readings: Play by Wang Chunli, are nostalgic and almost ghost-like, their forms barely fleshed out in a palette of blue, brown, and beige. Wang Chunli's painting technique is heavily mediated by the act of facsimile, making physical and digital copies of images until they are reduced to their essence. His painting style evokes the quality of memory; shapes shift and shimmer in an ether tempered by blue melancholy. The subjects are indistinct, as are the specifics of their presence, and it is perhaps the emotional tones of the painting that register most clearly.

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  • Exponential Repetitions of Visual Readings: Play
  • Wang Chunli (b.1982) was born in Chongqing. He is a recent graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he attended high school, and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Like Chen Shijun, with whom he shares a studio, Wang Chunli studied oil painting, and his practice absorbs much from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's storied oil painting tradition. Wang Chunli uses the medium to mediate between digital and physical image-making proceses. The “Exponential Repitition of Visual Readings” series, for example, makes abstractions from images sourced online, such as an image of American president Barack Obama: in order to create the final work, Wang photographs the image, and then photographs the image of that image. The process is repeated seemingly endlessly, like a hall of mirrors, resulting in a final image of stark colors and forms, boiled down to the essential, abstract ghost-like structures of the original. Recently graduated, Wang Chunli has only recently begun showing, mostly in domestic group exhibitions with many of his young Chongqing peers.

    Click on the artist's name for more information
    WANG Chunli 王春黎
$35.00

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