Chen Wei was born in China’s Zhejiang Province in 1980, and now lives and works in Beijing. He was awarded the Asia Pacific Photography Prize in 2011, and nominated for a Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art in 2015. Chen Wei is represented by the Leo Xu project and by Galerie Rudiger Schottle. In 2011 he was involved in A Plus, the exhibition orchestrated by Lana Crawford and Modern Weekly that gathered together top fashion designers and artists in China. Chen has used commissions from fashion and art magazines, such as FHM and LEAP, to realise projects that bring together conceptual photography and fashion design, while featuring products by labels such as Bottega Veneta, LV and Prada.
Chen worked with experimental music before he turned to photography. Since that switch he has been engaged in sound art, performance, video and installation. Many of his works – the dark, deserted interiors, or the dance club portraits – have a dramatic, cinematic quality. Chen is best known for the Float series, which calls attention to China’s prohibition of large gatherings – except in the case of nightclubs. The images evoke temporary escapes from a restrictive reality, and that transience is reinforced by deliberately exaggerated, dream-like settings.
Chen takes inspiration from the daily news and from everyday life, as well as from artists such as John Cage and Wolfgang Tillmans. He is more concerned with capturing the outcome of conflicts than with showing the stories behind them.
Chen has exhibited widely in China, Korea and Japan, in the UK and across Europe. Among his solo exhibitions are Noon Club, programmed by Francesco Bonami, JNBY Art Space, Hangzhou; In the Waves, K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2015) and The Club, Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, Australia (2017). Group exhibition include ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Performance and Imagination: Chinese Photography 1911-2014, Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2014); The Work in Progress: Photography from China, Museum Folkwang, Essen,(2015); We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art, Asia Society Texas Center, Houston (2016); Chinese Whispers, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2016). Chen’s work has also featured at the Seoul Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, the Pingyao International Photography Festival and the Poznan Biennale.