Chen Zhe
APT9
Born 1989 Beijing, China
Lives and works in Beijing, China
Chen Zhe’s finely realised photographic imagery draws on her deep and ongoing research to explore what she describes as ‘the ambiguous meeting point between visual representations and language’. Chen is best known for her controversial photo series and artist books, Bees (2010–12) and The Bearable (2007–10), which attracted worldwide attention for the artist’s unflinching documentation and contextualisation of self-harm. Since 2012, Chen has been engaged in a long-term investigation of visual and linguistic representations of dusk. Collecting postcards, notes, sketches and her own photographs, she has created an archive of psychological and emotional responses to the phenomenon of dusk, the nebulous space between day and night. Although very different in form from her investigation of self-harm, she continues to mine the psychological fissures between the visible and the spoken.
Chen Zhe / China b.1989 / The Only Question is How to Endure – Immersing (detail) 2017 / Metal shelf, archival pigmented inkjet prints mounted on diabond and glass / 180 x 180 x 10cm / © Chen Zhe / Image courtesy: The artist and Bank MAB Society, Shanghai
Composed of four large cabinets displaying images and documents, The only question is how to endure 2017 focuses on different approaches to the problem of how to spend the twilight hour. The work is part of the ongoing project Towards Evening: Six Chapters by Beijing-based artist Chen Zhe. Since 2012, Chen has studied visual and linguistic responses to dusk in art, science and literature. With a particular focus on ‘evening disquiet’, the artist explores the uneasy psychological space created by the gathering darkness.
In this work, Chen’s evocative photographs — depicting the unmistakable tonal shift as late afternoon light gives way to darkness — are grouped alongside illustrations found in the course of her research, and quotations from a wide range of literary sources. This arrangement plays on cross-readings between photographic representation and poetic language over four different possibilities: waiting for darkness, feeling the weight of time passing, savouring the sunset and the promise of night, or contemplating its profundities.
