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Lot Essay
A graduate of the Faculty of Printing of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and a new-generation artist born in 1975, Chen Qiulin harbours profound feelings towards China’s urbanisation. Adept at photography, performance and video, he employs these to express his various misgivings about the course of contemporary social development. 2007’s The Garden Series - one of the most prominent serieses in Chen’s artistic career - started out as a video, but the independent film scenes thereafter morphed into a photographic work recording forced demolition and relocation, transformation, mass migration, gentrification, and other such inevitable concomitants to urbanisation. This series has been widely studied by scholars, collected by Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, and exhibited in The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane and The 7th Gwangju Biennale, as well as Hammer Project: Chen Qiulin at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
In the foreground to The Garden No. 1, two male migrant workers stand front and rear in a row, forming a visual emphasis to the picture amid its background rife with a metallic sense of the industrial carriers and looming urgency; they bear the sticks of carrying poles on their shoulders, with rich peony, lotus red, rose pink and pale seated in a striking manner in front of the carriers reaching out to the construction site ashore behind them. The gorgeous contoured appearance of the flowers starkly contrasts with the modern edifices charged with their regimented mechanical order. Chen Qiulin exploits this front-and-back dichotomy through the depths of this work’s multi-layered composition to distill the essence of social contradictions and their reality, and to convey the intelligence that “the external world is not real.” Rather, photos - as a vehicle of presenting the reality - could also embody the creator's response to reality. An industrialised cityscape, porters of the old days, and seemingly colourful and expensive plastic flowers together invoke a poetic imagery sitting amongst the misty rivers.
In the foreground to The Garden No. 1, two male migrant workers stand front and rear in a row, forming a visual emphasis to the picture amid its background rife with a metallic sense of the industrial carriers and looming urgency; they bear the sticks of carrying poles on their shoulders, with rich peony, lotus red, rose pink and pale seated in a striking manner in front of the carriers reaching out to the construction site ashore behind them. The gorgeous contoured appearance of the flowers starkly contrasts with the modern edifices charged with their regimented mechanical order. Chen Qiulin exploits this front-and-back dichotomy through the depths of this work’s multi-layered composition to distill the essence of social contradictions and their reality, and to convey the intelligence that “the external world is not real.” Rather, photos - as a vehicle of presenting the reality - could also embody the creator's response to reality. An industrialised cityscape, porters of the old days, and seemingly colourful and expensive plastic flowers together invoke a poetic imagery sitting amongst the misty rivers.