CHEN ZHE ｜TOWARDS EVENINGS: MY HEART （Exhibition) 陈哲 ｜“向晚：我的心” （展览）

CHEN ZHE ｜TOWARDS EVENINGS: MY HEART

Galleri Image is glad to present the “Towards evenings: My Heart” exhibition by the Chinese artist Chen Zhe, curated by He Yining. For the first time in Europe, the exhibition will present selected works from Chen Zhe’s Towards Evenings: Six Chapters, an ongoing quest for the nebulous space between day and night, light and twilight, the known and the unknown, spanning 10 years from 2012 to the present.

With a particular focus on the tension between reading and viewing, the series draws inspiration from literary and visual materials across time and cultures. While the chapters stand independently, they also interact with each other and constitute a network of human experiences that center on the intricate and transient time of the dusk. Three of the six chapters in this series are already in progress: The Uneven Time(非均质的时间), Nightfall Disquiet (向晚意不适), and The Red Cocoon (赤之茧). In these chapters, Chen Zhe explores the visual and linguistic textuality of the temporality of dusk, the unsettling body-mind experience that the dusk brings, and the irreconcilable conflict between freedom and belonging at the magic hour.

The Chinese phrase xiangwan 向晚 (“towards evening”) refers to the time when the sun is about to set. It not only alludes to uncertainty and transience but also appears in classical poetry as a metaphor for decline and an expression of melancholy. In this carefully selected space, we invite the viewer to join us in a dialogue between text and image, time, and space, and to step into the “synchronic”【1】 universe constructed by the artist, where a constant dialogue between body-mind-spirit takes place.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chen Zhe’s practice is often restored as an ongoing exploration, discovery, and research process. In her early work The Bearable and Bees, where the physical self-destruction of her subjects is identified as an act of spiritual cleansing, Chen searched for the possibility of “another way of telling” by expanding her photographic observations with a collection of letters and journals. In her current project, “Towards Evening: Six Chapters,” Chen uses dusk as her motif to continue her quest of the visible and the speakable, in this case, to explore the ambiguous meeting point of visual representations and language.

www.zheis.com