Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the latest exhibition at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery by Beijing-based artist Chen Wei, a series of LED sculptures initially look like high-tech speakers, flickering in blue and purple. But that picture does not fit with their steel poles, which protrude like scaffolding. As the eyes adjust to the gloom, another idea takes hold. They are miniature skyscrapers — and something about them is broken.On the walls are staged photographs, typical of Chen’s work. In one, a glass door is locked with a glowing ring. In another, a man sits hunched inside an illuminated makeshift tent, a self-confinement chamber. “One part of it is to do with Covid,” says Chen of the exhibition’s title Breath of Silence, adding a wheeze for effect. But it is also to do with “a space for discussion”, of the changes that the pandemic did not usher in but merely consolidated. “I feel like we are now in an era of isolation,” he says. “Everyone is like an island.”People seem to have lost themselves. The light is shining, and they don’t know where it is Best known for his neon-lit photographs of nightclub ennui in the mid-2010s, Chen is part of a wider artistic sensibility in China: one that tackles urbanisation and its discontents. Like the skyscrapers themselves, the approach speaks to feelings of vast ambition — and vast limitation.Born in Zhejiang province in 1980, Chen recalls a childhood where there was for a while no electricity. It was a time of scarcity; his father first bought him a camera when he was 10. After studying videography at Zhejiang University, he began to exhibit photography in the 2000s, initially in a way that involved “no plan”. This soon became an issue, because for Chen, there is “no limit to what you want to express”.In a search for focus, Chen’s lens homed in on the city, which “has many layers, like a picture has many layers”. Noon Club, a series of atmospheric, staged photographs of isolated nightclubbers stripped of all their frenzy and connection, brought international attention. “People seem to have lost themselves,” he says. “The light is shining, and they don’t know where it is.” As well as nightlife itself, the work also explored “the state of people” in the 2010s, when the early optimism of China’s economic growth miracle was already beginning to fade. But it also coincided with his own life: his move to Beijing in 2008, the shift into his thirties, the pressure to buy a house.Well into another decade, Chen is turning inwards. Breath of Silence includes a triptych of images depicting screens. One shows a man, his face obscured by the glow of a phone. Another shows a woman lying on a sofa, facing away from the camera, the glare from the unseen phone implying that she is not, in fact, asleep. A third shows a darkened room and the blinding light of an open laptop, set on a table with a cloth on it, as if it were an altar. “Covid made everyone alone,” says Chen, “but even without Covid it was already like that . . . We are forced to enter a screen, we work every day, we work incessantly to display ourselves.”For his next project, he plans to delve further into the “new reality” of screens. “In China and America it is most obvious,” he says. “We slowly hide in our screens, we take everything and put it in screens.”Economic decline, urban isolation, a schism between the real and the virtual: any observer would be forgiven for thinking of the artist as a pessimist. But in person — speaking in a regionless Mandarin peppered with English phrases — Chen frequently breaks into laughter on all variety of topics (at one point he does so while recalling a Mao-era slogan: “Catch up with Britain and overtake America”). Recent works in the Hong Kong show, including a photograph of lemons scattered under dappled light, suggest gentler, even more humorous, textures. Another work — a piece of cloth lit by a projector on both sides — resembles rain running down a window. (I almost missed this but was alerted to it when two visitors from the mainland were photographing it. “China is developing too fast,” one said.)Art, according to Chen, is a way of establishing a “collective memory”. “In this memory,” he says, “we do not immediately want to make a judgment.” People are “too quick to make judgments”, but a “new world should have new understandings”.What is being collectively remembered? In recent decades, Chinese cities have grown at breakneck speed — Chen chuckles at the thought, as though laughter is the only appropriate response. When he was a child, he rarely went to big cities: they were simply something he imagined (it was easy to imagine things back then). “These days,” he says, “we tend to say globalisation has finished.”In 2019, just before the pandemic began, he had a conversation with an Italian architect at an open studio event in Zurich. He told him about his childhood in the countryside, the lack of electricity, the “singular image of my mother holding a candle”. The architect had a very “intense feeling”, Chen recalls. “He said it was as though, in such a brief 30 or 40 years, I had lived through both his father and his grandfather’s generations.”“There is no major cultural discussion,” he says, “as to how we bore this change . . . This is what my art is trying to express.”To April 12, blindspotgallery.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
