西岸 | BEST BUND

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to announce its participation to Condo in Shanghai, opening on July 7, 2018. On this occasion, the gallery in West Bund will share its space with London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa. Both galleries will respectively present the latest creations by Chen Ying, working and living in Beijing, and London-based artist Issy Wood.

The word Condo, derived from "condominium" consists of a large-scale cooperative exhibition project involving various galleries around the world. Through this project hosting and collaborating galleries have the opportunity to share their space, or jointly curate exhibitions, or again divide the gallery space to simultaneously showcase different exhibitions. Condo calls for art institutions to reassess existing exhibition models, gathers resources and acts to provide an environment conducive to the organization of experimental exhibitions.

For Condo, Chen Ying will bring a selection of six new paintings. After the success of his first solo exhibition in MadeIn Gallery in September last year, Chen Ying began to seek for an "unfamiliar" creative state. Avoiding subject dependence and discarding old painting habits, Chen began to deal with unconventional “fresh” objects. Through these new works one can feel the challenges and surprises brought by these transformations. Simultaneously, as Chen decided not to proceed with certain creative methods, he however pursues certain of his unique techniques, using computer software to reconstruct scenes from daily visual experiences in relation with image layers. The winding lines and wavy stripes - these visual elements with momentum – form a transient profile of his painting experiments.

A recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Issy Wood shares Chen’s interest in exploring the dividing line between the worlds of objects and ideas, similarly employing digital technology in her painting process. While Chen utilizes photoshop in his image-making, Wood turns her mobile phone into a relay station for the image, enabling the transition between the physical and virtual worlds. The lusterless objects of luxury in her work, be that jewelry, apparel or decorative statuettes, speak of the artist’s melancholic reflections on the consumerist society. This sense of nostalgia deceptively endows this young artist’s paintings with the visual qualities typically found in 20th century art.

Chen and Wood, two artists with different backgrounds, from different generations and regions, all use painting as their main creative medium. Within this process of repeatedly being declared dead while returning to the field again and again, paintings still carry the dizzy halo that cannot be dimmed. This artistic collective project, will faithfully reproduces the creativity of these two artists. 

Chen Ying (b.1982, China)

Born in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang Province of China, Chen Ying majored in Scenography and graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in 2010. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Chen’s paintings mostly originate from real-life scenes. During his creation process, Chen integrates iconic geometric forms within scenes from his everyday life, reconstructing the image. As the three-dimensional space is constantly compressed and altered, the work under his paintbrush gradually becomes abstract. Chen’s practice presents perpetual incidental changes, and a subtle conversion between two and three-dimensional space, reality and withdrawal are revealed through the artist’s meditative perspective. 

Issy Wood (b.1993, U.S.A.)

Issy Wood lives and works in London, having graduated the Royal Academy of Art Schools in 2018. Her paintings probe the ideas of drama, gender, physique and costume, finding the horror and the humdrum in everything from Pointillism to Sex and the City. The bodies she paints fall just short of accurate historical or sexual identities, instead communicating by virtue of being overly saturated, smothered with jewellery or ornaments in and of themselves. Caught on the boundary between the real and the imaginary, Wood plays on the dual status of painting as object and image.