Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Büro Basel

Chen Wei: Drifting Along

9. Juni – 9. Juli 2019

ShanghART Gallery and Waldburger Wouters are pleased to announce Chen Wei’s upcoming solo exhibition „Drifting Along“ at Büro Basel. It features the final chapter of Chen Wei’s photography and installation works dealing with people and spaces in metropolitan nightlife, a series the artist has been working on over the past six years. Chen Wei builds life-sized stage sets, employing light and colours, then constructs a narrative environment with blurred spatial boundaries. The mock dance halls in Chen Wei’s works are always permeated with dampness; with vague chronology. The atmosphere reveals a strong sense of immediacy. During the shooting of „Disco“, for example, Chen Wei directed young urban people to embody being inebriated on the dance floor, thus capturing their body movements disappearing into the sound wave, as well as their mental state of forlornness and confusion. When human figures are invisible, like in the „Dance Hall“ Series, Chen Wei fills the pictures with objects: the disco ball on the empty dance floor, the iridescent mosaic wall, the cold glowing mirror, and the neon lights with ads flowing. All the scenes in his photography seem like a pantomime of revelry ready to start, but also like a group portrait of the exhaustion and hollowness after urban nightlife ends.