Artist Chen Wenling's large-scale solo exhibition "Limited and Infinite" will be held in Xiamen
- suyangstudio
- Dec 18, 2024
- 6 min read
Xiamen is the second hometown of Chen Wenling, a famous contemporary artist who was born in Anxi, Fujian. He studied and grew up in Xiamen, completing the initial shaping of his own world view and values. 17 years ago, the "red storm" created by Chen Wenling on the beach of Xiamen Island is still warm. Now, he will return to Xiamen with hundreds of fine works of art, and his works will be presented at Aotou Fishing Port in Xindian Town, Xiang'an District, with the ocean as a 360-degree panoramic stage and the openness facing the sea and the world as a new attitude of contemporary art.
On October 4, 2018, with the guidance of Xiamen Development and Reform Commission, Xiamen Ocean and Fisheries Bureau, and Xiamen Xiang'an District People's Government, sponsored by the Propaganda Department of Xiamen Xiang'an District Committee and Xiamen Xindian Town People's Government, hosted by Aotou Fishing Port Characteristic Town, Xiamen Aotou Construction Development Co., Ltd., and Xiamen Aotou Chaokuang Art Museum, co-organized by Aotou Community, Oucuo Community, Art Xiamen, Yilan International, More Art, Domain Culture and Art Institution, Aotou Seafood Association, Aotou Culture Promotion Association and various resident spaces in Xindian Town, Xiang'an District, and sponsored by Li Art Investment Institution; "Finite and Infinite: Chen Wenling Contemporary Art Exhibition" and "Facing the Sea, Chaokuang" Aotou Culture and Art Season, hosted by Fan Di'an and Xu Li as academic hosts, Gu Zhenqing as curator, Su Yang as exhibition director, and Su Yao as general coordinator, was grandly opened at Chaokuang Art Museum and Kekao Wharf in Aotou Fishing Port Characteristic Town, Xindian Town, Xiang'an District, Xiamen. Nearly 200 cultural and artistic guests from home and abroad came to the opening ceremony to celebrate the event and witness the mutual reflection and passionate collision of Chen Wenling's visual art and Xiamen's marine ecological sonata.
At the "Limited and Infinite: Chen Wenling Contemporary Art Exhibition", Chen Wenling exhibited works such as the 9-meter-high and 18-meter-long monumental giant sculpture "Community" on the seaside of the scientific research dock to highlight and activate the open geographical context, historical memory and cultural heritage of Xiamen Aotou Fishing Port, which is also one of the starting points of the Maritime Silk Road and the Nanyang Development Road. In the Aotou outdoor space and Chaokuang Art Museum, Chen Wenling will also present more than 50 sculptures and installations, more than 200 works such as manuscripts on paper, photography, oil paintings, and more than 30 important documents. This will upgrade this exhibition to the largest and most comprehensive art solo exhibition of Chen Wenling in recent years. In addition, Chen Wenling also specially invited Estonian artist Siim-Tanel Annus from the other end of the "Belt and Road" and the Eurasian continent as a dialogue artist to implement the "Road" performance art plan on site, forming an international communication context of on-site communication and dialogue with Chen Wenling's art works. On the lawn outside Chaokuang Art Museum, Chen Wenling also launched a public art participation activity called "Ten Thousand People Plastic Turtle" for the Aotou Cultural and Art Festival with the help of digital and intelligent technology means of network APP software design and dissemination, which brought the popular, trendy and local connotations of contemporary art to the local community and the Internet public, and promoted and shared it widely, strengthening the creative potential development and aesthetic education function of participants of different ages such as children and the elderly, thereby promoting the shaping of a distinctive, ecological and intelligent new century urban culture in Xiamen.
Chen Wenling is one of the Chinese artists who has entered the international contemporary art context with his unique sculptural talent and spatial modeling ability. The art circle often calls Chen Wenling an outstanding Minnan Chinese artist together with Cai Guoqiang, Huang Yongping and Qiu Zhijie, who are well-known both at home and abroad. Minnan culture not only allows Chen Wenling to appreciate the spiritual baptism of Minnan folk culture under the influence of multiple god worship such as Mazu belief, but also inherits the subtle traditional value recognition of Minnan folk social structure such as village clan and sect organization. In the long historical evolution of China's patriarchal society, Minnan people have incorporated a large number of re-creative elements into their cultural prototype of multiple god worship. This highlights the unique dual complex deep cultural structure of Minnan folk tradition. Minnan folk society not only relies on and follows the unified political and cultural system of China and the core Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism mainstream culture, but also unyieldingly maintains the alienated state of Minnan marginal culture and its continuous transcendence of traditional regulations and real constraints. This alienation and transcendence carries a strong cultural consciousness of self-expression and self-appreciation.
When talking about the curatorial ideas, the curator of this exhibition, Gu Zhenqing, said: "The limited freedom that Chen Wenling feels in his artistic creation is a self-training of technical refinement and language purification under the traditional rules of the sculpture game. He often starts from the natural properties of sculpture materials and media to grasp the aesthetic logic and sense of order of sculpture itself. The fantastic ideas highlighted by his expressive language have the logical starting point and starting point of traditional sculpture." Starting from imitating and simulating real objects, Chen Wenling not only created a series of images of innocent boys with "red children" and "mask children" as the main body, but also created a group of simulacrum characters and anthropomorphic animal images that satirize and criticize modern secular society, its consumer culture and desire bubbles. Among them, the entire body or partial body of many characters bears the mark of Chen Wenling's unique elongated and deformed expressive language. Chen Wenling's human figures, figures combined with animals, figures combined with the environment, and various human landscape images, spanning classical, modern and contemporary contexts, bringing together the media of sculpture, installation and ready-made products, have a kind of "family resemblance" of art and openness of meaning that Wittgenstein specifically refers to. Then, starting from the insight into the temporal traces of the sculptural image, he discovered and created various multi-dimensional visual rhetoric techniques that refreshed the image. Whether it is a surface effect of liquid flowing and dripping, or a physical energy experiment of gravity and anti-gravity, or a way of integrating different sculpture products and prop fragments, Chen Wenling realizes it through the language inertia of analogy, flexible performance techniques and ironic and humorous visual vocabulary, thus creating a batch of super-daily images that are both familiar and unfamiliar to the audience, and constructing a distinctive style, high recognition and individual specificity of his own sculptural art.
Chen Wenling erected the giant sculpture "Community" with a height of 9 meters and a length of 18 meters at the Xiamen Aotou Scientific Research Wharf in a stationed manner, facing the sea and the strait between Xiamen and Kinmen. This work integrates many classic symbols of China and the West in the way of simulating the ancient Zhaozhou Bridge in China, and constructs a bridge across the sea and the strait landscape by borrowing scenery. Chen Wenling tried to use the appeal and influence of artistic language to cross geographical, ethnic, religious and cultural boundaries, build a bridge for human salvation, and demonstrate the common destiny and common values of mankind under the condition of global integration.
Chen Wenling's "Community" series of sculptures is an integrated work dedicated to recontextualizing humanistic symbols and art history models. The artist cuts and extracts the time, occasion, location and other factors on which some symbols and models of the human world are produced, strips off the original prefaces and postscripts of these symbols and models, and reconstructs the context, thereby creating a new reference and meaning. This kind of intellectual visual production is almost focused on all the sculptures created by Chen Wenling in recent years with the concept of integrated innovation. Chen Wenling often performs the magic of context reconstruction, making all kinds of incredible fits, juxtapositions, and mixed associations between his existing works and ready-made products, or multiple different existing works, in order to inspire inspiration and create integrated new works. The artist goes deep into the human semiotic spectrum, decontextualizing and defunctionalizing the modern elements with heterogeneous relationships and the genetic elements of traditional Asian civilization, reassembling and re-structuring them, so that this reorganization and reconstruction becomes a special cultural hybrid and symbolic hybrid style of knowledge production, and becomes a kind of re-proliferation cell that gathers and spreads in the blood of multiple humanistic traditions.
Curator Gu Zhenqing explained the theme of "Finite and Infinite" of Chen Wenling's contemporary exhibition as follows: "For Chen Wenling, contemporary art, as a unique humanities discipline and humanities field, has an independent value system. It is this independent value system of contemporary art that allows Chen Wenling to experience the finiteness of freedom and the infinity of the artistic universe. As a result, he personally practices a state of life of constant self-transformation and a native spirit of constant self-refreshing."
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