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.