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THEME: INDUSTRIAL

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: Daydream, takes an image of late afternoon sun, refracted through a myriad of window panes, as its subject. The painting has a dreamy, nostalgic effect, the sunlight lost in plays of light and shadow just as the mind escapes into absent-minded thought.

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  • Online Encyclopedia: Daydream
  • 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
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
Zhu Zhiwei’s paintings dwell on the incredible scale of China’s industrialization, and the relationship between modern city-dwellers and the man-made environment that they inhabit. In Paradise—Chasing the Wind, factories obscure the horizon. The elongated format and multiple, skewed perspectives of create an intentionally disorienting, fantastical setting. The large central tower seems to be falling apart while it is swarmed by Zhu’s distinctive pink figures. Wearing sunglasses, they climb, dangle and perch on the tower’s nonsensical railings and ledges, creating the impression of an industrial playground. A few characters appear in heroic poses - climbing, carrying objects or helping each other scale the structure. Some sit idly, while others busy themselves pulling pieces off the tower or casting debris downwards. The painting’s lone woman, wearing a qipao (a traditional Chinese dress), dangles her heels, while two men engage in a fistfight down below. On the higher platforms several people. including a man in a red cape, look off into the distance. All appear to be oblivious to rickety state of the tower.

Amidst this flurry of activity, the tower’s purpose remains unclear; the top disappears into a dark, hazy cloud of smoke that drifts across the upper left-hand corner of the composition. The painting’s low vantage point and the strong diagonal lines formed by the tubes on either side of the tower create a disorienting perspective. Viewing the tower from its base, we too can contemplate climbing its dislocated staircases.

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  • Paradise: Chasing the Wind
  • Zhu Zhiwei (b. 1983) was born in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, graduating from the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2007. Encouraged at a young age to pursue his interest in art, Zhu Zhiwei tested into a high school affiliated with the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute when he was a teenager, and continued on for advanced study. His parents' working class background left a profound impact on Zhu Zhiwei, whose works are dominated by the presence of industry. Factories, workshops, and machines make up the backdrop to most of his works, peopled by small, naked chubby human figures, their skin an angry pink. The figures in his works seem equal part cherub, gremlin, and lemming, teeming over the edges of forbidding industrial smoke stacks and production lines. The artist sees cities as the inheritors of industrial civilization, and his works are a whimsical exploration of the industrial landscape as a site of life and livelihood. For a young, emerging artist, Zhu Zhiwei has already shown in moderately within the mainland, and as his practice develops, his profile seems poised to grow.

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    ZHU Zhiwei 朱志伟
$35.00
Zhu Zhiwei’s paintings dwell on the incredible scale of China’s industrialization, and the relationship between modern city-dwellers and the man-made environment that they inhabit. Modern Behemoth No. 1 depicts a multi-tiered, abstracted mass of blackened machinery and its twelve orange inhabitants. The wild brushstrokes that surround this structure convey a sense of wild motion and instability, which is reinforced by the viewer’s low vantage point and the cable swinging from the crane on the right. The dripping streams of black paint give a feeling of gravity and oily grime.

The twelve cartoonish characters are disproportionately large compared to the cranes and superstructure, but their oversize heads give them an infant-like appearance. They frolic about, while some vandalize machinery with glee. They appear to be unaware of the precarious state of the platform, much less its original purpose. The overall impression is that of an unsupervised industrial playground hurtling wildly through space.

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  • Modern Behemoth No. 1
  • Zhu Zhiwei (b. 1983) was born in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, graduating from the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2007. Encouraged at a young age to pursue his interest in art, Zhu Zhiwei tested into a high school affiliated with the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute when he was a teenager, and continued on for advanced study. His parents' working class background left a profound impact on Zhu Zhiwei, whose works are dominated by the presence of industry. Factories, workshops, and machines make up the backdrop to most of his works, peopled by small, naked chubby human figures, their skin an angry pink. The figures in his works seem equal part cherub, gremlin, and lemming, teeming over the edges of forbidding industrial smoke stacks and production lines. The artist sees cities as the inheritors of industrial civilization, and his works are a whimsical exploration of the industrial landscape as a site of life and livelihood. For a young, emerging artist, Zhu Zhiwei has already shown in moderately within the mainland, and as his practice develops, his profile seems poised to grow.

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    ZHU Zhiwei 朱志伟
$59.00
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.

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    WANG Chunli 王春黎
$35.00
Chen Jiao's Dali depicts the characters for the Chinese city in southwest Yunnan province. It takes a moment to read the characters—the second character is positioned backwards—and they stand out more for their bold form and rich texture than their content, an effect achieved through layering colors and a variety of materials, such as paper, paint, chalk, and blackboard. Chen's use of signage is abstract even as her manipulation of medium creates a very specific effect—Dali has a quality of urban vibrancy about its embrace of the material, allowing a two-dimensional surface to invoke a myriad of social connotations, opening up the abstracted work to many possibilities.

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  • Dali
  • Chen Jiao (b. 1983) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 2006. After staying on for a Master's degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chen left the country for a residence scholarship at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Germany, followed by an art exchange at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. Chen's Chinese and European pedigree has served her well, and she is widely exhibited within China. Her works are often nostalgic, recreating the industrial surroundings of her childhood in ghost-like architectural sketches. Other works are abstracted paintings of natural surroundings, paintings that seem to equally mix the subjects of traditional Chinese landscape with the power of abstract expressionism. To Chen, both approaches are means of exploring the spiritual essence of an object, exploring the mixed significations and emotional registers as they exist in her mind.

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    CHEN Jiao 陈皎
$35.00
Chen Jiao's November 7th is named after a date, but features an industrial building, sketched lightly against a square grid. More than the building itself, its form stands out against the blank background, with perspective points and the foreground's boundary clearly visible. Against the front building's side, a slogan is available: “safe production,” painted in bold red characters. The final two characters are each drawn backwards, giving a clue that this is image is not actually meant to be a precise rendering of an actual structure. The markings of light color washes are visible in the background, and the work is dotted with Chen's calculations, leaving building measurements and calculations visible. But Chen is no architect. Trained in oil paiting at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, Chen leaves the calculations visible as a means of voicing the utility and design that goes into the sketch, asking which meanings remain when the building is described in only its signs.

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  • November 7th
  • Chen Jiao (b. 1983) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 2006. After staying on for a Master's degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chen left the country for a residence scholarship at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Germany, followed by an art exchange at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. Chen's Chinese and European pedigree has served her well, and she is widely exhibited within China. Her works are often nostalgic, recreating the industrial surroundings of her childhood in ghost-like architectural sketches. Other works are abstracted paintings of natural surroundings, paintings that seem to equally mix the subjects of traditional Chinese landscape with the power of abstract expressionism. To Chen, both approaches are means of exploring the spiritual essence of an object, exploring the mixed significations and emotional registers as they exist in her mind.

    Click on the artist's name for more information
    CHEN Jiao 陈皎
$35.00

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