About artist: Shen Wei is a Chinese-American artist based in New York City. He is known for his intimate self-portraiture and contemplative images of people and nature, highlighting the understated beauty of his surroundings. He also works in painting, sculpture, and video.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of the City of New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, China, the Hasselblad Foundation in Göteborg, Sweden, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Aperture, ARTnews, Paris Review, ArtReview, Financial Times, and The Burlington Magazine.
Shen Wei’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the CAFA Art Museum, and the Ringling Museum of Art, among others.He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
"Besides, everything in this universe has its owner; and if it does not belong to me nor a tiny speck can I take. The sole exceptions are the cool breeze on the river, the bright moon over the hills. These serve as music to our ears, as colour to our eyes; these we can take freely and enjoy forever."
—— Su Shi
Entering the new exhibition The Retinus of Dionysus at Nan Ke Gallery, Shen Wei's photography works are like flowers, quietly distributed and growing in the exhibition space. Plants and de-gendered human body fragments intertwine and echo, forming a poetic intertext about gender identity.
Celosie (9909) , 2021 / Untitled(k4930) , 2019
Archival Pigment Print
114.3h x 76.2w cm / 50.8h x 33.88w cm
5+2AP
Artist Shen Wei was born in Shanghai and currently lives and works in New York. In the frame-breaking transformation of culture, he chose to write in a peaceful and gentle way about his gradually deepening understanding of himself while living in this dynamic. In his creative process, plants and the body have always been his favorite objects of observation. The Between Blossoms series of works profoundly embodies this meticulous observation and depiction, softly weaving nature and the human body together. The series of works A Season Particular on display this time tells the connection between the two more clearly. Through the way of contrasting arrangement, it is hoped to more clearly explore the deeply rooted intertextuality between the two, so as to A free perspective tells thoughts and experiences about identity.
Celosie (9909) , 2021
Archival Pigment Print
114.3h x 76.2w cm
5+2AP
On one and a half floors, Celosie (9099) presents cockscombs immersed in mist-like vegetation. The bright colors thus become soft and ambiguous, expressing a frank and sober mixture of emotion and thinking. The voice of this narrative is amplified on the third floor, and parts of the body are added to the picture, echoing with the plants. In the work Untitled (K4939), male nipples are focused and watched, showing a shape and texture similar to flower buds. Cherry (3052) on the side echoes this hazy temperament and concretely expresses the softness similar to the human body. Shen Wei seems to be exploring the return to human nature through the objective comparison of plants. And in this way, the body’s authentic characteristics and belongings are expressed after stripping away the gender framework given by social values.
Rose (9686) , 2021 / Untitled(L2255) , 2021
Archival Pigment Print
76.2h x 114.3w cm
5+2AP
The opposite Untitled (L2255) and Rose (9686) continue this idea. The soft curves of the buttocks are mixed with the sense of strength brought by the muscle lines, demonstrating the de-binary thinking of gender; while the bright red underwear creates an eye-catching and lively atmosphere, just like the red flowers jumping out of the simple background. This contrast subtly grafts the "naturalness" of flowers onto the human body, thus completing the transmission of beauty that weakens restrictions and constraints.
Untitled (D5059) , 2019
Archival Pigment Print
50.8h x 33.88w cm
5+2AP
Shen Wei's dreamlike lens language expresses a diverse imagination of the natural state through the connection between flowers and the human body. People are like flowers without roots, they can walk freely, and the subconscious and even prejudices rooted in the collective consciousness of the pernicious cultural habits are eliminated. During the journey, the power of beauty and joy and the power of loneliness and silence are amplified at the same time. Therefore, travelers can absorb more freely from the outside, and take care of, understand and love themselves inwardly.
Rose (9709) , 2021
Archival Pigment Print
33.88h x 50.8w cm
5+2AP
In this exhibition, the process of search and discovery seems to be more important than the final attributes of body and gender. Shen Wei's lens travels through the vast nature, and then freezes to capture and record interesting details. With the subtlety of traditional Chinese aesthetics, we explore the reality beyond any cultural context. It seems that the viewer can join the journey without knowing it, and share the only thing that can be taken from this world during the journey, that is, the process of discovery, experience and thinking itself.
Text by Roxane Fu
May 17, 2024
