Paris Photo 2022 , The Curiosa
Solo Exhibition Art Fairs Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, Booth: SC10

Artists: CHEN Wei 陈维

Preview opening：9 Nov.

Online Viewing Room: https://parisphoto.viewingrooms.com/

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in Paris Photo, the Curiosa Section, curated by Holly Rousseau. “New City” is Chen Wei’s ongoing project since 2013; continuing this project, "Goodbye"depicts and represents some moments about leaving and separation in "new city" by the means of photography and installations. Chen Wei's works start from building life-sized stage sets; he juxtaposes double spaces to extend the on-site feeling: one unit is dim, while the other is luminous. With the absence of inhabitants, the theatrical stage infuses the "white cube" space with an unstable temporality, then constructs a scenery from the blurry boundaries between the illusory and actuality.

Chen Wei perceives photography as a means of offering his own specific and subjective view of the world, often highlighting the malaise in modern life. Working as designer, constructor, and photographer in his Beijing studio, the artist meticulously builds each scene into an almost-life sized model. In his decade-long ongoing project, New City, the artist addresses with a degree of irony banal environments and objects, referring especially to those people and constructions which quickly disappear from the consciousness, if not from existence. In a country so focused on replacement, renovation, and material progress, Chen Wei explores the poetics of ephemera. Chen Wei’s subversive theatrical stagings combine conceptualism and skilled craftsmanship to articulate, in their quotidianness, a nostalgia which seldom finds a place in present-day China, inspiring the viewer to ponder the true meaning of progress. (Holly Rousseau)

---

More Pictures: