AIKE Exhibition Scene｜Chen Dongfan "The River"
陈栋帆
Chen Dongfan
河流
The River
2023.05.27 - 07.29
（每周二至周六 Tue-Sat，10:00 - 18:00）
AIKE，上海市徐汇区龙腾大道2555号6号楼
Bldg 6, 2555 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai
AIKE is pleased to present Chen Dongfan's solo exhibition "The River", featuring the artist's works completed from 2020 to 2023. Chen Dongfan emphasizes infusing strength and sensible rhythm into his artwork while playing with humorous perspectives. He cherishes his burning vitality and transforms it into streams of lyricism that resonate with music and literature.
Chen Dongfan wishes to breathe life into his paintings and allow them to be part of life. His creations revolve around strength, warmth, depletion, preservation, time, and romance. He tries to unify an individual's training in and beyond his imageries as a response to the breath of life, detouring between time and sensibilities.
In cultural history, the river symbolizes the subconscious, the feminine, an abundance of nourishment, or the danger of flooding. Living by the river was the source of governance in early civilization. Rivers carry labor and memory built around them, representing the record and amnesia of history. At the same time, rivers symbolize boundaries and transformation through them. Washed by the river condenses and rewrites memories while foretelling and blessing the new life.
· The River of Memory ·
"The agitated wetness then flows down along the reef, and the wind subsides, and the clouds disperse, and the perilous waves, because they are pleased with this, rest in the sea."
--Horace, Hymnal, Vol. 1, No. 12[*]
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
At the exhibition's entrance, a series works on canvas, "Posters", and a group of small works on paper, "Letters", revolve around history and amnesia, whispers, and cries. During the 2020 lockdown, Chen Dongfan was shelter-in-place in his Lower East Side apartment in New York. Unable to go to the studio without any painting materials, or freedom to travel, he began working on the "Letters to Forgetting" in a suffocating atmosphere and with minimal supplies. Chen Dongfan looked at the materials he had at home, and he only found Chinese letter paper and oil paint. Without any solvent, he used olive oil to blend his colors. The Chinese letter paper has a "silk fence" design, where the printed frame and lines seemed symbolic of confinement and passivity. However, Chen hoped to transgress a feeling of powerlessness of the times through communication and warmth contained in the "letters".
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
Then in 2022, these small letters are writ large on canvas. While the dimensions changed, the artist's emotions and feelings were also transmuted. Chen Dongfan kept the letter's frame and painted the artist's signature and work title on the border, so the "forgotten letters" became "unforgettable Posters”. Help!, Bending over Backwards, In Dubious Battle, YOGA, Good Wine with Coffee Added, and Everything is Illuminated are like the warnings on the poster. They are supposed to be the messages left to be discovered by the viewers in the letter series. Still, here, confronted with the river of history or amnesia, the passivity in the letters turns into active expressions in the posters.
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
The other side of the entrance consists of a series oil paintings on paper, "STAY HOME", a wall of oil paintings that would never dry. These disparate images demonstrate sensitive perception and fierce attitude; some depict exercising, others think hard, dream, or shout at something, and each image is branded with the phrase "STAY HOME". These works were also created during the lockdown at the beginning of 2020. Since the paint was tempered with cooking oil, these brush works will remain fresh. Although they may seem peaceful and safe wrapped under the frame, they can always be repainted and modified inside.
· River of Transformation ·
"Explain that the harsh winter has the joyful change brought by spring and warm wind, that machinery drags up the keel of the dry ship, that the livestock no longer loves the pen, that the ploughman no longer looks to the fire, and that the lawn is no longer white for the provision of refreshment."
--Horatius, Carmina, Vol. 1, No. 4[*]
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
Once entering the exhibition space, one will be greeted by several large paintings by Chen Dongfan. The first is his latest work on canvas, Solo, completed in 2023, where the brushwork shimmers, blooms, and flows. Unlike many of the artist's paintings, this piece is not heavily coated with paint but leaves many added white and porous pictorial space. Like a piece of music or poetry, it provides an allure for the viewer's imagination, allowing every will and opportunity to appreciate the work and complete its own journey. The blue, yellow, and red with emerald green, flesh pink, and black come and go like symphonic movements, their ebbs and flows in unison or single note, undermining the meaning of boundaries. In introspecting "Solo", the shades of this painting and the illumination of the brushstrokes make the meaning emerge.
The sense from the shading and illumination also shimmers in the large-dimensional work on paper, The River, which revolves around life and love. Pure and blended colors appear in various ways, and spontaneous brushstrokes overlap into new forms. The brushstrokes and color blotches are juxtaposed, cut, strung together, wrapped, scratched, provoked, repressed, and blessed. In Chen Dongfan's view, people who make art their profession will always be skeptical of its meaning or constantly demand a newer, more convincing purpose for art. Although, when the work only concerns a specific person and his life and love, the anxiety to search for meaning dissolves and becomes unimportant.
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
From "Letters", "STAY HOME", and "Posters" to "Solo", what the power of painting presents is the reason for life. For Chen Dongfan, the image is not an end but a "situation". He paints in any given space, in buildings, and on the street, on ready-made products, and the front and back of paper and canvas; he likes to start painting with materials at hand, such as paper, newspapers, packaging paper that he picks up randomly in everyday life, and paper that has been covered with paint from other works on the studio floor. In Chen Dongfan's view, there is no distinction between creative and non-creative materials; he transforms the "things" encountered in the course of his life into something unclassifiable through the act of drawing so that they can produce a state of existence similar to that of a human being, for them to experience life and living like a human being while leaving behind long traces. In this process of transformation, Chen Dongfan unfolds his work through painting, where "work" exceeds the specific connotation of an "artwork" and enters into a broader sense of "labor".
· The River of Blessing ·
"O boat! The new waves will wash you back to the sea. What do you want to do? Do your best to seize the harbor!"
--Horatius, Carmina, Vol. 1, No. 14[*]
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
The spread-out "pages" in this exhibition present the kind of "transformation" mentioned above. Chen Dongfan began a project called "Yearbook", where he would turn a stack of folded pages into an album of paintings every week of the year. In his 2018 "Yearbook", he tried to turn the book into images, using the book as a method and painting as content. For the latest works of this series in 2023, Chen Dongfan reversed the roles of painting and book, where the fold, symmetry, and pages became places where the images are engendered. Text is absent in this "book". Instead, the artist turned song titles or lyrics into the title of each painting. According to Chen Dongfan, he often reminisced about specific short phrases, thinking about and pondering them. He believes that outstanding words have many layers, which are mesmerizing and fascinating - these layers and rhythms unfold into the open pages in this exhibition.
The pages on the gallery floor create an interesting contrast with the several vertical paintings on the wall. In Chen Dongfan's words, "When I make the small drawings, I go with my instinct, and gradually extend the imagery into a broader field; it's the contrary for large paintings, where I try first to enter a trance, not holding onto any thoughts, but leaving the pure mind imagery on the painted surface." For him, making an abstract painting is an "exercise" to restart the state of mind and to fill the body with passion and vitality, which can translate into a unique and unconventional art practice. In making abstraction, knowledge, experience, and concept may be invalidated, which Chen Dongfan perceives as a life-threatening adventure.
Uproar in Heaven, 2021, Acrylic on paper, 208 × 152 cm
These adventures are one's life encounters, only that the artist has had more genuine feelings and expressions in painting. Created in 2021, the title of Uproar in Heaven comes from the name of a cocktail that blends almost all types of spirits, which may toss and turn one’s body and mind. The artist downed the drink and began this painting in the garage studio of his home. It ignited the artist's realization of his immediate predicament and uncertainty, and recalling the image of the Monkey King wreaking havoc in the Heavenly Palace repeatedly in a compelling sense of regulation and repression.
Rhythm of the Waves consists of 24 works on paper. Chen Dongfan came to live and work in New York in 2014 at his home in Williamsburg. When he had visitors, they would always notice the paper and brushes on the table, and Chen would scribble while having conversations. At times, he would invite them to write and draw with him. In 2023, these papers, which recorded the people who came and went in those days, were put together into a large painting, and Chen Dongfan summoned new strokes and colors based on the original scribbles; in his words, "It's like a painting of the sea." Chen Dongfan also wonders "Whether art recorded the time of those lives, or people experienced time through art?"
“The River”, Installation view, AIKE, 2023
Shanshui 2 is based on the artist's experience in the mountains of New York State in the fall, whose subject is not necessarily "the landscape" but rather "people in nature". At the gallery's end, an abstract monochrome painting, There and Back Again, seemed more like a "landscape painting". It's painted over a 10-year-old painting entitled An Island, a Toy Junkyard, "There and back" is, in fact, a sense of "nostalgia".
Humans measure the world with their feet and wheels and frame it with eyes and car windows, which will eventually become experience and memory. How experience and memory work in our brain is synonymous with the composition of a picture. However, in the painting medium, brushstrokes and colors allow the artist to reorganize memories and perceptions, transforming one's intellectual and spiritual framework in visceral ways. Short lines, superimposed, squeezed, and hidden, or long and fast strokes compose visible forms by no means intended for the painting but aim to create ripples beyond the pictorial. Artistic creation is like throwing stones in the river of life and time, stirring up a wave. Chen Dongfan mentioned intentionally that he found dotted brushstrokes in his latest works, and he considers these dots as symbols of blessing - a blessing transformed into a brushstroke, just like fireworks blossoming into the reflection of a river.
Text/Liu Beining
Poster Design/Transwhite Studio
Endnote
[*] Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carmina, translated and edited by Liu Haoming, Huadong Normal University Press, March 2021.
关于艺术家
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1982 in Zibo, Shandong, he graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2008. The artist presently works and resides between New York and Hangzhou. Chen’s painting practice entails a multitude of experimentation, encompassing various forms and themes, incorporating concept, action and site, among various other elements, taking these as means to substantiate a both complex and robust system of practice. The artist’s easel based painting manifests two clear practical trajectories. In the first, narrative themes and a naiveté of form are deployed to express insights into a lived reality; in the second, both expressive and abstract forms serve to uncover potentialities within painterly discourse. His practice also encompasses works produced for public space, along with collaborative happenings incorporating live painting, music and performance.
His recent exhibitions include: “Rhythm”, OōEli POP-UP Gallery, Hangzhou, China, 2021;“Long Past Dawn, Pirates and Poets Whistle in the Dark”, Fou Gallery, New York, USA, 2020; “Forgotten Letters 2020”, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, China, 2020; “Sanctuary”, Yeh Art Gallery of St. John University, New York, USA, 2020; “Portrait”, Inna Art Space, Hangzhou/New York, China/USA, 2019; “Nevermore”, Fou Gallery, New York, 2018; “Heated Bloom”, Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China, 2017; “You Know My Name, Not My Story”, Fou Gallery, New York, USA, 2017; “Child Wants to be a King not an Artist”, Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China, 2015; “So Sweet”, Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China, 2012.
Chen Dongfan has actively participated in various public art projects and has created large scale paintings around the globe, including “Long Time No See”, Cheng Du, China, 2020; “Sun Yat-sen Road in Color”, New York, USA, 2020; “The Song of Dragon and Flowers”, New York, USA, 2018; “Live Before You Die”, Athens, Greece, 2016; “Where Has Happiness Gone”, Hangzhou, China, 2011; “Uncertain”, Hangzhou, China, 2010. “Chen Dongfan Open Studio” was included as an official event in the program for New York’s Asian Contemporary Art Week 2018. In 2011, the artist participated in Art Basel Liste. In the same year he also participated in a residency project in Torre Canavese, Turin, Italy. In 2018, along Doyer’s Street in New York’s Chinatown, Chen Dongfan realized a large scale public art project supported by the New York Transportation Department in conjunction with the Chinatown Partnership. The artist took the surface of a 61 meter road as canvas, creating a vibrantly colored abstract painting “The Song of Dragon and Flowers” which The New York Times reported it as “a portrait for the street.” In addition to this, the artist received recognition from the New York State Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives for his exceptional contribution to the area and the community.