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THEME: PEOPLE

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: True Facts No. 2 takes as its source a digital photograph of man's 1960s landing on the moon. The photograph bears the watermark of Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese government. Chen Shijun highlights the conflict between battling narratives from the United States, responsible for the landing, and Xinhua, responsible for narrating the story to a Chinese audience. The title of the work, True Facts (2) is a question asking what is reality, how is it represented, and who tells it?

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  • Online Encyclopedia: True Facts (2)
  • 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
Huang Yuncan’s series New Youth, looks at the transience of youth and the delicate memories it creates. Huang mimics the haziness of recollection with floating spots that coalesce into figures and interactions.

Two women with puckered lips approach one another with awkwardly bent knees and wrists. Their affected air kissing belies a system of social interaction borrowed from elsewhere—are these kisses of greeting, parting, or have they taken on a completely new meaning? In contrast with their parents generation, these members of China’s urban youth sport the latest fashions, Chuck Taylors and sunglasses. With the exception of the women’s flushed faces, the only other items that receive special notice are the purple gloves and red coat, bringing focus to material possessions. Within the mind’s unreliable archives, a superficial detail can come to define a moment.

This moment seems contemporary, but Huang presents it as a memory, begging the question of what the future holds for this generation and its hybrid culture, and more importantly, what it will be remembered for.

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  • Red Clothes and Purple Gloves
  • Huang Yuncan (b. 1982) graduated from the oil painting department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2005, and continued her graduate studies until 2008. She has participated in group exhibitions in many of China’s major cities, including Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

    The series New Youth depicts an experience of youth that is unprecedented China, and is a result of the country’s new material wealth. She portrays her subjects looking carefree and trendy, but at the same time self-conscious – capturing the awkwardness and uncertainty that accompanies the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

    Her characters exist in neutral fields without context. This could suggest the uncertainty of youth, or possibly the lack of fixed references in China’s rapidly changing conditions.

    Huang’s images are presented as animated but imprecise recollections with floating spots that coalesce into figures and interactions. The tenuous bonds between the spots threaten to dissipate at any moment, imitating the brevity of youth and the fragility of the mind’s eye.

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    HUANG Yuncan 黄云璨
$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.

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    WANG Chunli 王春黎
$35.00
Luo Fahui is part of the generation of artists who studied fine arts shortly after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His oil paintings, which are characterized by surreal, pearly gray compositions, punctuated by bright splashes of crimson and turquoise, address themes of desire, isolation and violence.

The title of this work refers to ancient poems of mystical excursion, in which a Daoist master is carried off to the realm of the Immortals. These stories were sometimes fantasies of poets who dreamt of escaping conventional society. In Chinese mythology, the Immortals’ preferred mode of transportation was a fantastical red-crowned crane; mortals who achieved immortality were similarly carried off by one of these creatures. The Immortals prized rare magical peaches, which conferred 1000 years of life on those who consumed them.

In Mystical Journey, the artist has added a slew of roses, which in Luo’s work are frequently associated with desire and lust. The Daoist master has been replaced with a large fleshy boy, possibly the artist’s alter-ego. The crane hovers indecisively between an inviting bed of lush blossoms below and the glowing heavens above. The child bears a peach of immortality in one arm and more roses in the other. It appears that some difficult choices will have to be made if the journey to transcendence is to be completed.

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  • Mystical Journey
  • Luo Fahui (b. 1961) was born in Chongqing, Sichuan province, and was one of the very first classes to enroll in the recently re-opened Sichuan Fine Art Institute following the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. He graduated from the oil painting department of the Sichuan Fine Art Institute in 1985, and unlike his avant-garde peers, managed to avoid participating in many of the artistic movements that took the careers of his peers in art centers like Beijing and Shanghai abroad. He predominately works in oil, painting images of pearly, fleshy bodies amidst amorphous grey backgrounds with hints of color and bloodshed on their forms. The bodies are full of lust, loneliness, and violence, while still lives often feature flowers whose vibrant red petals look like stains, and the artist has also begun fabricating fiberglass sculptures with similar themes. Luo Fahui has shown extensively within China, receiving his first solo show at the National Art Museum of China in 1993. Since the early nineties, he has also shown modestly abroad.

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    LUO Fahui 罗发辉
$35.00
A toothy grin and great googly eyes. A child smiles at you, and the aviator's cap on her head is both absurd and whimsical, a joke the child knowingly shares with you the observer. Children are a frequent theme in Guo Jin's work, meditations upon pure joy and unadultered idealism. But against the context of modern China, the commentary takes on deeper, critical tones, asking if society's innocence has been lost or if naivety remains; if our worldview is youthful with its eyes full of opportunity, or blinded and obscurded by play-acting and make-believe.

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  • Portrait of a Child
  • Guo Jin (b. 1964) was born in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 1990. His paintings frequently take children as his subject matter in a juxtaposition of youth with China's own development, and idealism lost. After graduating in the early '90s, he showed modestly within China, significantly in Guangzhou Biennale's 1992 oil painting exhibition, in which many of his Sichuan peers also showed works. Since then, as art institutions and infrastructure have grown within China, he has participated in an increasing number of shows, often with his brother, the artist Guo Wei. His bold use of color and skill at creating silk-screen-like texture in oil have garnered him the attention of many gallerists and collectors. He lives and works in Chongqing and Beijing.

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    GUO Jin 郭晋
$35.00
Children are a frequent theme in Guo Jin's work, meditations upon pure joy and unadultered idealism. Jumping catches three children at Henri Cartier-Bresson's “decisive moment,” poised in kinetic potential as they jump mid-air against an abstract pink sky. Their rounded bodies possess a convincing heft, but their skin is spackled in red, yellow, peach, and white, a texture that suggests both materiality, like the surface of marble, and the passage of time, like antiqued painted furniture. Are these children real or allegorical? Where are they leaping to and what are they leaping from? Guo Jin's work gives itself to many different readings, but the children's sense of dynamism and joy remains constant.

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  • Jumping No. 5
  • Guo Jin (b. 1964) was born in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 1990. His paintings frequently take children as his subject matter in a juxtaposition of youth with China's own development, and idealism lost. After graduating in the early '90s, he showed modestly within China, significantly in Guangzhou Biennale's 1992 oil painting exhibition, in which many of his Sichuan peers also showed works. Since then, as art institutions and infrastructure have grown within China, he has participated in an increasing number of shows, often with his brother, the artist Guo Wei. His bold use of color and skill at creating silk-screen-like texture in oil have garnered him the attention of many gallerists and collectors. He lives and works in Chongqing and Beijing.

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    GUO Jin 郭晋
$35.00
Children are a frequent theme in Guo Jin's work, meditations upon pure joy and unadultered idealism. Sliding captures a group of three moving with grace and abandon down an unseen slide behind them. Their movement is innocent, capturing a moment of play, but when the children are considered as stand-ins for something greater, whether that be society or the state of a country, the painting takes on greater complexities: does the downward slide imply loss or danger, and if so, what is the childrens' agency? Did they initate this descent, or plunge into it unwittingly? Guo Jin's work gives itself to many different readings, but the painting's sense of momentum and unknown potential remains constant.

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  • Sliding No. 3
  • Guo Jin (b. 1964) was born in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, and attended the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, graduating from the oil painting department in 1990. His paintings frequently take children as his subject matter in a juxtaposition of youth with China's own development, and idealism lost. After graduating in the early '90s, he showed modestly within China, significantly in Guangzhou Biennale's 1992 oil painting exhibition, in which many of his Sichuan peers also showed works. Since then, as art institutions and infrastructure have grown within China, he has participated in an increasing number of shows, often with his brother, the artist Guo Wei. His bold use of color and skill at creating silk-screen-like texture in oil have garnered him the attention of many gallerists and collectors. He lives and works in Chongqing and Beijing.

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    GUO Jin 郭晋
$35.00

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