Chen Wei

Chen Wei (*1980 in Zhejiang Province, China) lives and works in Beijing. He is one of the most important Chinese photo artists of his generation. In his photographs, he creates fantastic visual worlds, settings, situations, and isolated spaces, which evoke in the viewer a mixed feeling of fascination and melancholy. Chen Wei consistently seeks to express this sentiment in his iconic, mostly deserted and stage-like images. The urban scenes seem like frozen moments from a movie or memories of a dream, often leaving behind an ungraspable feeling. These fictitious, surreal pictorial creations are based on observations that Chen Wei draws from his everyday surroundings. The formal orientation towards the old masters of painting and photo artists such as Jeff Wall or the Dusseldorf School of Photography remains recognizable in Chen Wei’s latest works. The poetic pictorial composition, in which color, materiality and light are perfectly attuned to one another, invariably stands in the foreground and exerts an immediate effect on the viewer. The socio-political allusion to contemporary life in China only comes to light on closer examination of his works. The human presence is reinforced by its absence.

Die Arbeiten von Chen Wei sind in zahlreichen internationalen Sammlungen vertreten, darunter das Centre Georges Pompidou Paris; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; UBS collection; Dsl collection, Paris; Fondation Carmignac, Paris; Kankuro Ueshima Collection; K11 Foundation, Hong Kong; M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; White Rabbit Collection, Chippendale; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Yuz Museum Shanghai.