Gang Chen "Invasive Intimacy"

Crossing Art

poster for Gang Chen "Invasive Intimacy"

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Crossing Art presents Gang Chen: Invasive Intimacy, the New York solo debut of Beijing based artist Gang Chen curated by Catherine Lee. Invasive Intimacy is an exhibition of paintings inspired by the x-ray images of luggage taken when it passes through airport security. Chen’s work explores the relationships between the object and its owner through a forced transparency of self, an invasive intimacy. Chen aims to demonstrate the side of mankind that is unable to express a combination of feelings such as distress mixed with ecstasy and aesthetic beauty with dysfunction.

Chen’s subject matter ranges from religion and sex to violence and youth which he presents through objects associated with each. Through his combinations of enlarged and fictional x-rayed objects, such as a woman’s purse or a ceramic figure, he challenges his audience to look inward. Chen explains that, “The airport x-ray machine reduces the object to its barest image, a pale inner image, a kind of intense, digital abstraction”. The paintings challenge the possibility of discerning the difference between an “object” that is dangerous versus one that is not. Chen’s work becomes an analogy for our population’s inability to be entirely sure of anything even in our outrageous attempts to control and prevent. Juxtapositions appear through Chen’s affinity between subject matter and application of paint as he depicts the relationship between transparency and opaqueness, public and private. Growing up in the opaque political structure of Communist China, Chen was made acutely aware of the human need for transparency. Chen believes that through transparency the lines for communication can be fully opened. Only when we are exposed and vulnerable will we be able to understand, with depth, each other.

Gang Chen was born in China and studied art at Nanjing Art Academy and the Central Academy of Drama in China. Upon arriving in New York, after studying in London, Chen took a break from paintings and began exploring photography and film-making directing two full-length films and lecturing through Universities in China. Gang Chen’s multi-media art works have been exhibited in John Moore’s Liverpool Biennial, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Ethan Cohen and Crossing Art in New York. He currently lives and works in New York, NY and Beijing, China.

Media

Schedule

from February 24, 2011 to April 10, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-02-27 from 15:00 to 18:00

Artist(s)

Gang Chen

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