Beginning January 6th, 2023, Fu Qiumeng Fine Art will present Chinese artist Chen Duxi (b. 1983)‘s first major solo exhibition in North America. Titled, The Order of Body, the exhibition consists of 13 neo-traditionalist works on silk. Building on his existing series 持頤 (Chi Yi) and 尔躬 (Er Gong), Chen harnesses the physical act of painting as a vehicle to explore the relationship between objects, motion, and time and intimately reconnect himself and the viewer with the natural world.
“How does one really perceive an object?” This is the question that prompted Chen Duxi to produce the latest works in his ongoing series Er Gong. The term “er gong” is adapted from an archaic Chinese expression that can be translated as “your body.” But in this case, “your body” transcends the limiting notion of human form to include references to plants, animals, and even minerals. Which body is yours, and which body is theirs? From the perspective of Chen’s vibrant and meticulously rendered brushwork, we are reduced to simple phenomenological extensions of the natural world we inhabit.
The artist conceives each work as a focused study of an individual organism. Painted to appear as magnifications, Chen’s jewel-toned subjects resonate against their monochromatic backgrounds. Their bodies pulsate in an ebb and flow of delicately washed lines referencing the qi (energy) and concealed shi (momentum) that support and animate our observable world. As the forms unfold against the fragile silk surface, Chen invites us to grasp the ineffable through purely visual or pictorial means. “We are used to giving things definitions, and that’s it. We only seem to care about their function,” the artist remarked. By contrast, Er Gong is a concerted attempt to peel away the accumulated layers of human language and description that scaffold the space between contemporary humans and the natural world; restoring our ability to glimpse the extraordinary in the everyday.
Although his forms are representantional, Chen’s goal is never to simply reproduce the natural. Instead, these familiar forms operate as abstractions, evoking feelings to edge us steadily closer to visual enlightenment and a state of nature. And in this drive to unveil l his subjects’ essence, we discover academic and painterly references to a host of both eastern and western traditions. Chen’s undulating lines and thoughtful spacing, which compress and release his subjects by degrees, reveal his familiarity with Song and Yuan masters Wang Zhenpeng and Li Gonglin. But the formal logic behind the artist’s luminously high-contrast silks just as surely reflects his appreciation for Naive French painter Henri Rousseau, Crete’s Bronze Age Minoan frescoes, and the Roman wall paintings discovered at Pompeii. Equally, the works’ technical precision and painstaking details seem to reference bestiaries and herbariums: ancient and medieval texts, which are often considered the first deliberate attempts to describe, and by extension, to master the natural world.
But, unlike those ancient texts, Chen Duxi’s Er Gong does not seek to control the “bodies” that fall under his gaze. No classes are formed, hierarchies promoted, or judgments framed. Instead, these expressive explorations of form and color are a simple bid to rediscover a harmonious relationship with the other bodily objects that share our environment. While countless paths may lead us to transcend the limitations of cognition, Chen’s quest to reveal his subjects’ fundamental forms through lyrically vibrant pictorial depiction may be among the most pleasurable. As Chen states, “the nature of things is their essence, and the essence’s responses to external conditions constitute phenomena. Although the essence is invisible, one can arrive at it through phenomena.” And it is reasonable to suppose that the more vibrant and intense the phenomena, the simpler it is to reach the core, which might account for the fact that all his subjects are so vivid and full of life, basking in the glow of nature’s creation.
