Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present “Linear Bodies”, a solo project by Chinese artist Feng Chen, at Liste Art Fair Basel 2022, featuring his recent carbon fiber three-dimensional drawings and photographic works.
Tenacious, malleable and incredibly light, carbon fiber has become Feng Chen’s choice of raw material when creating sculptures for it grants a liberating sense of autonomy, freeing him from traditional working patterns of sculpting to explore on his own. Continuing to push the material’s limits, Feng Chen has expanded on his investigation of carbon fiber for the past few years with this new group of works, which showcases new possibilities with the integration of gold and silver foil for visual vitality, and supportive materials for enhanced durability and tensile strength.
Starting with sketches on paper, Feng Chen transforms two-dimensional lines into carbon fiber structures that occupy and activate the three-dimensional space. What disguise themselves as paint strokes on the wall at first glance begin to morph and reveal their subtle volume in space as the viewer walks around the works and shifts viewpoints. Realized over a weeks-long, handcrafted process, each abstracted component of a circle, a curve or a line are subsequently joined together to constitute a single piece of work, that, from a certain angle, is potentially reminiscent of a face, a galaxy, a giant eye, or whatever the roaming imagination decides to land on. The resemblance sneaks up on the viewer like a good joke, resulting in an “Aha!” moment. Yet in the end, they are merely visual illusions that can disappear with a step towards the left or the right – a story that the eyes tell the brain. The artist is both an accomplice in the deceit with his deft plant of visual clues and a vigilant questioner, pointing out the often-neglected gap between perception and reality.
The viewers find themselves in another game of trickery in front of the photographs. While their preconceptions may lead them to assume that the photos are digitally generated as the images barely resemble any recognizable object in the physical world, and photography is commonly (but mistakenly) believed to document reality, the material “gelatin silver print” dismisses the assumption. These unique black-and-white prints are realized in a darkroom using one of the most traditional photo-printing processes, starting with exposing light on photographic paper. Nevertheless, here the light source is laser beams that are programmed to shift with sound patterns randomly generated by a synthesizer, and exposed directly onto light-sensitive paper in a camera-less process. Similar to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic series Lightning Fields, where he applied an electrostatic generator directly onto film, Feng Chen translates invisible signals into images by creating these “portraits of sounds”. The photos inspire an open-minded way of understanding the world around us as a new dimension may emerge when perceived with a different sense.
The works on view exemplify Feng Chen’s broader practice across multiple mediums in querying our habitual trust and reliance in the senses. In the spirit of the works, we are encouraged to embrace the perceived reality with curiosity, experiment and a sense of humor. After all, as the artist advocates, experience is the most essential and authentic part of existence and the ultimate nature of reality.
