胶囊上海｜陈飞：镜花缘
陈飞：镜花缘 Daniel Chen: Flowers in the Mirror
展期 Dates: 2023.01.10 - 02.25
地址 Address: 胶囊上海，上海徐汇区安福路275弄16号1层
Capsule Shanghai, 1st Floor, Building 16, Anfu Lu 275 Nong, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
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胶囊上海荣幸呈现陈飞的首次个展“镜花缘”，展览标题来自于清代李汝珍创作的魔幻志怪小说，小说中描述了主人公乘船在海外游历包括“女儿国”以及女性在朝廷中有所作为的故事。这部小说歌颂女性的才华，挑战当时性别传统的束缚。作为华裔艺术家陈飞，以此作为首次展览的标题，他想挑战抽象绘画的历史传统，同样花这个意象也作为重要的线索贯穿他的创作图景中。于艺术家而言，花象征爱，美与时间：施予与馈赠花是一种爱的表达；“夜来风雨声，花落知多少”[1]，花瓣的零落是对韶光易逝的伤感，也是艺术家无数孤独心碎的独处时刻。画中的花瓣的每一笔都是他存在的痕迹，是爱的语言。
“镜花缘”是艺术家移居上海后在中国的首次个展，在你了解完陈飞的所有故事之后，再一次看他的绘画你会知道，真正的绘画来自诚恳的面对自我的良心，来自勇敢地面对无数个孤绝时刻。你必须诚实地面对组成自己的过去，现在，才可以诚实地面对自己的未来。艺术家笔下的每一朵花瓣都变成一片爱或者不爱的罪证，你爱或不爱，爱的语言就在那里。
文 / 程敏
2022年12月31日
[1]《春晓》（唐）孟浩然
Beginning with his academic training in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, for a long time, Daniel Chen painted figurative images of grain fields under the highly saturated golden sun of his native Alabama; his mother's kitchen that gave him a sense of warmth and belonging; and the gaze directed to his own body as an Asian male. He speaks of those early paintings as a healing process through his personal life — a song that commemorates the sentiments as a child of a first-generation immigrant family.
Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present Daniel Chen's first solo exhibition “Flowers in the Mirror”, which takes its title from the Qing-Dynasty supernatural-fantasy (Mohuan Zhiguai) novel, in which the main protagonists travel by boat to fantasized lands, including the Women’s Kingdom (Nv’er Guo) with tales of women making their way in the imperial court. The novel celebrates the talents of female figures and challenges the constraints of gender traditions of the time. Adapting the same title for his debut exhibition, Chen intends to challenge the history of abstraction as a Chinese American painter. Here, the imagery of flowers serves as an essential thread that blooms through his creative landscape. For the artist, flowers symbolize love, beauty and time: offering and gifting flowers can be an expression of love — "Blame it on the wind and rain of last night, that countless flowers dropped off to the ground.” [1]— the scattering petals reflect the sorrow for the time passing, as well as countless moments of heartbreak and solitude. Each stroke of the painted petals is a trace of his presence — a language of love.
Chen's painting language harks back to expressionism; he piles, deconstructs or builds up layers of paint on the canvas, and then reorganizes them into new compositions and forms. For the artist, these buried layers embody the traces of time as he treats oil paint almost like sculptural materials, repeatedly stacking, trimming and reapplying it. There is childlike joy in his touch, akin to a kid playing with Lego blocks, giving his imagination a playground to use specific color combinations and modules to assemble different compositions. In Chen's case, the building blocks are colors; one must grasp the rules of this painterly game in order to create a unique image of one’s own. The proportion of each composition is guided by a precise draft made beforehand, and the final image is assembled to form a manifold landscape of the subconscious mind. In Cross Bridge (2022), for example, the artist incorporates an aerial view of the city streets with bright neon lights into the form of an open book with precise structural proportions and his unique formula of colors. After his first trip to Mount Huangshan in his familial hometown Anhui from the United States, where he grew up, he immediately realized the emotions, rhythms and aura in Chinese landscape paintings. He then recalled his first encounter with the dotted brushstrokes of Georges Seurat, an all-time admired painter of Chen’s. In Untitled (Huangshan) (2020), Chen decides to use his formal training in painting to visualize the landscape that is preserved in his heart.
Daniel Chen 陈飞 | Landscape Sunset 日落风景 | 2022 | oil on canvas 布面油画 | 190 x 210 cm
“Flowers in the Mirror” is the artist's first solo exhibition in his familial homeland China. Upon learning about Chen’s story, looking at his works, you are reminded that a genuine work of art comes from an earnest confrontation with oneself and from the courage to embrace solitude. Looking deep into the past and present that make up who you are empowers you to welcome the future with honesty. Each petal grown under the artist’s brush is a testament to the existence of love. Whether you are a believer or not, the language of love is written there.
Text by Cheng Min
December 31, 2022
陈飞于1997年出生于美国阿拉巴马州亨茨维尔，现工作于中国上海。他毕业于罗德岛设计学院油画专业，并获得Florence Lief奖。他的创作基于他对亲历生活的热诚记录，并运用抽象表达让司空见惯的静物油画变得出其不意。承载着时光流逝的独特笔触构建了陈飞直觉驱使的作画过程，这种创作方式与油画本身鲜艳的色彩、俏皮的风格和绘画语言的糅合给人带来的愉悦印象形成反差。颜料在他的画作中返璞归真——它们亦为油彩，亦为物件，亦为传情达意的媒介。
Daniel Chen was born in 1997 in Huntsville, Alabama, and currently works in Shanghai, China. Chen received his B.F.A. in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design with the Florence Lief Award. An earnest documentation of a lived live underpins his practice, and exploits abstraction to divert expectations away from the familiar still-life painting. The intuitive process of painting is built up through individual strokes carrying demarcations of time that oppose the expectation of joy the paintings initially bring from the playful appearance of vibrant colors and combination of painterly languages. The paint is simple functioning as paint – paint as paint, paint as object, paint as communicative, or paint as emotive.
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