Chen Wenling：Making a Brand-New Appearance through Hyper-Reality
 
Chen Wenling is one of the most representative sculptors of contemporary artists. His large-scale solo exhibition "Emergency Exit", designed by famous curator Huang Du as his second solo exhibition for Chen Wenling, is going to be held at 4:00 p.m. on August 29th, 2009 in Joyart Space.

The exhibition will display two big sculptures, which are "What You See Might Not Be Real"【1100×580×300cm】, and "How to Escape"【480×200×200cm】. In addition, the solo exhibition will provide some of his sketches and a documentary film, in order to help the audience recognize and undersand artist’s creation clue.

Despite the powerful and dynamic exaggeration remaining in his  two latest sculptures, Chen Wenling has made a bold adjustment in his overall creative thinking. In the first place, he builds a kind of distinctive and unique art language through Hyper-Reality in terms of concept, language and style, surpassing the language system with firm, folk, spectral and vulgar signals. Secondly, his point of view of political economy changes from comparatively local cultural issues to international political and economic issues—to take global financial crisis as the spotlight of visual culture and analytical target. The artist chooses the well-known "Golden Bull" of Wall Street and "Ponzi" financial cheater Madoff as his creative target, satirizing the complicated relationship between people and money in contemporary capitalist society and the enormous loss and damage to people brought by free capitalist economic system.

In the exhibition, audice can find  Madoff crushed against a huge wall by a bull breaking wind in "What You See Might Not Be Real", vividly portraying Madoff''s embarassed, helpless and painful image. The dynamic bull''s wind not only refers to the ending of people''s greedy brag, but also symbolizes the danger of virtual bubbles in the international financial center. In this society of desire and money, some people create many false impressions, while some people are deluded by these impressions. Madoff is only an epitome chosen by the artist. As the name said, "What You See Might Not Be Real", that is to say, things we can see might not always be the real fact, and it contains an extrodinary critical meaning for the society.The artist elaborates some sort of sophisticated relationship between people and capital through this representative figure, reflecting a common plight people around the world are suffering under the economic crisis.

Compared with "The God of Material" Series, Chen Wenling''s new artwork direction is conceptual criticism on social reality. It is a kind of art language on the basis of reality and hyper-reality. He tightly grasps the concept that to place the sense of movement of sculpture language into thought, and conceptually transforms classic sculptures, in order to create a kind of new sculpture—device language. His art deeply analyzes and reveals the moral crisis, credibility crisis and belief crisis behind visual token, rather than vividly reproduce the sophisticated game relations between people and capital. As a matter of fact, he makes idea and language appear in consistent with demonstration and form, instead of being superficial. This is the core of Chen Wenling''s artistic concept—to provide a kind of new way of viewing and understanding through visual language.

Opening:4pm, Saturday, August 29, 2009
Venue: JoyArt, Zone D10, 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxian Qiao Road,
Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Opening Hours: 10am – 6pm, Tuesday – Sunday
Tel: ＋86 10 5978 9788
Email: joyart@yahoo.cn
Website: www.joyart-beijing.com