THEME: WEB
- 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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$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: 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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$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: Disaster, takes as its source material a screen capture of an image search result on a Chinese search machine, showing the iconic photograph of the Hindenberg burning in mid-air. The famous photograph has become ubiquitous, popping up in searches for the word “disaster,” and here Chen Shijun gives the photograph a sense of its age by instilling the painting with rich texture and wear.
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$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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$35.00