Chen Hui 陈辉
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
Chen Hui is a painter and make-up artist. Born in 1971, she lives and works in Nanjing.
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Date & Place of Birth
Chen was born in 1971 in Jiansu, China.
Education & Development
In 1992, she graduated from the Art College of Nanjing Normal University.
Art
With her most recent series of works, presented for the first time at her solo exhibition at Galerie Urs Meile, Chen Hui crafts scenes bursting with the silly and the strange, the flawed and the fabulous, the absurd and the banal, the throwaway refuse and that which can be scavenged. In doing so, she manages to reconnect images of hyperbolized popular culture, stylistic overkill and consumptive excess, with the latent humanity and sheer ordinariness of the flawed, imperfect people who populate her paintings.
As a professional make-up artist, teaching her craft for the stage and set at the Communication University of China, Chen Hui is intimately familiar with the ways a surface can be manipulated to present the simulacra of the externalized selves we hope others will see. Through her paintings, and in her own explanations of her work, she posits that no matter how much make-up we cake on, which elaborate costumes we may don, or what kind of shiny trinkets we take up to signal our tastes and values to the world, we can never really escape who we are.
Rather than posing as a critical unmasker, using her paintings to rip the scales from our eyes and show us the ugliness of the contemporary era in all its grotesque glory, instead Chen Hui offers a gentler sort of meditation. She lets us have our fun and poke fun at it too. She seems to understand that even as our masks are false, we need them to negotiate our place in a world dominated by polished veneers and superficial values. By making the disguises worn by these people in her latest series obvious costumes, she allows us to see both the surface and the subcutaneous at once; to see the ham-fisted attempts to adorn and embellish ourselves, in spite of the scars and the blemishes, the sag and the wrinkles, that we can never really conceal.[1]
Exhibitions
For Chen's exhibition history, click here.
Gallery Affiliation(s)
Chen is affiliated with Galerie Urs-Meile in Beijing and with Plum Blossoms gallery in New York.
Auctions & Acquisitions
For Chen's auction record, click here.
