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CHEN SHIJUN | 陈世君

  • Lives in: Chongqing
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.

A WORD FROM THE ARTIST

Internet is an important component of the information society. It has been penetrating the contemporary social mass, quietly changing our way of living and thinking, possibly changing the world in a seeable future. Internet is not only my major means of accessing to information, but also, to a certain extent, a way of comprehending the world. Therefore, I based my creation on the randomly retrieved images from Baidu, Google after typing in certain keywords, during which the abstract texts have been converted into the corresponding visual images. Furthermore, in such process of mutual referencing, a certain relation between the words and images, that may otherwise have little or no relevance with one another, has been established. Perhaps this can serve as a new angle to perceive the relations between images and times.

CURRICULUM VITAE

1982Born in Chengdu
2002Graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute High School
2006Bachelor's Degree in Oil Painting from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
2010Master's Degree in Oil Painting from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute
Exhibitions
2011Art Ecological Exhibition, Huang Jiao Ping, Chongqing
2010“The Way of the Image”, exhibition with Chen Shijun, Organhaus, Chongqing
Exhibition of Outstanding Works from Art Academy Graduates, Today Art Museum, Beijing
"Pass Through", Songzhuang Art Festival, Beijing
2008"LEmpathie", Tank Loft Center for Contemporary Art, Chongqing
2006Exhibition of Outstanding Works from Art Academy Graduates, Today Art Museum, Beijing

ARTWORK