SINGAPORE.- Ode To Art Contemporary will be holding a solo exhibition for one of China’s top ten contemporary sculptors, Chen Wenling, at Art Stage 2012 from 12 – 15 Janurary at the Marina Bay Sands Convention & Exhibition Center (booth D4-05). This exhibition showcases artworks from his two renowned series of sculptures: Red Memory and China Scene. Following a number of prestigious exhibitions, such as Art Basel in Switzerland and the Shanghai Biennale, Chen has been represented by Ode To Art for the last five years.
Born in 1969 in Anxi, in a small, remote village, Chen remembers his family being so poor that his parents could not afford to buy him toys and he grew up making figurines out of clay to entertain himself. Yet, he counts himself lucky because his parents encouraged his artistic talent and Chen went on to study at the Xiamen Academy of Art and Design, then at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
The two main themes of Chen Wenling’s sculptures are the manifestations of extreme humanity and immaterial images. His self extreme condition begins from the series of “Red Boy” (Red Memory). It is neither realism nor vanguard sculpture, but the self expression of Chen Wenling himself to the critical state of life. For example, dread, gladness, game and fancy are the basic main motivations of his sculptures. This series of “Red Boy” (Red Memory) conveys his experience in an autobiographic form.
“In his latest work “China Scene”, Chen Wenling has a change of front on his art concept, which made his work has the character of experimental and public. He gave full scope to his imagination, borrowed the methods of appropriation, assemblage and translation from post-modern concept. That is, blending and transforming the natural, traditional and modern images, so that creating a kind of surrealistic and fantastic scene of the so-looked mountain and stone. The fantastic mountains and stones are shaped to ambiguous things subjectively, like melting iceberg, or gigantic deer, also seems like traditional pavilion. The bottom of the sculpture looks like melting ice, while the top of the pavilion is beautifully carved drops. This twisty, fragmentized and unrealistic phantasm reappeared vividly a quiescent pure world and a sense of realistic alienation.
…. When among these works, the stainless steel surface will reflect the light, people would feel that they are in a fantastical and illusional world. In such sense, they would remain people to recheck the reference substance and the external transformation in our daily life and review our subjective sense, at the same time penetrate the changes in objective world. Therefore, through Chen Wenling’s sculptural language, we can move further to the value and meaning of Chinese contemporary art in the switching process between traditional aesthetics and modern aesthetics.” – Zhang Shuo, Editor
