Galleri Image presents the exhibition Towards evenings, My Heart by the Chinese artist Chen Zhe, curated by Yining He. For the first time in Europe, the exhibition will present selected works from Chen Zhe’s Towards Evenings: six chapters, an ongoing quest for the nebulous space between day and night, light and twilight, the known and the unknown, spanning a decade from 2012 to the present. With a focus on the tension between reading and viewing, the series draws inspiration from literary and visual materials across time and cultures. While the chapters stand independently, they also interact with each other and constitute a network of human experiences that center the intricate and transient time of the dusk. Three of the six chapters in this series are already in progress: “The Uneven Time(非均质的时间)”, “Nightfall Disquiet (向晚意不适)”, and “The Red Cocoon (赤之茧)”. In these chapters, Chen Zhe explores the visual and linguistic textuality of the temporality of dusk, the unsettling body-mind experience that the dusk brings, and the irreconcilable conflict between freedom and belonging at the magic hour.

Presented as a layered notebook weaving in and out of images and texts, “Bees & The Bearable” restores Chen Zhe’s practice as an ongoing process of exploration, discovery and research. What happens when actions that can jeopardize one’s existence, such as hurting one’s own body, in return serve the purpose of understanding existence itself? Should we see it as a fluky escape, or a relief from the weight of modern life? While the individual response may differ, the book illustrates that there still lies psychological connectedness that undoubtedly link each of us together. Everything else follows from there. “Bees & the Bearable”, which has been considered controversial due to its frank depictions of self-harm, was awarded Best Photobook of the Year at the Kassel Photobook Festival in 2016.

Chen Zhe (b. 1989) holds a degree in Photography and Imaging from the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles. Her works have been shown at biennials and museums around the world, including China, Japan, Germany, Norway and Australia. She has received a number of prestigious awards including the Foam Talent (2018), the Xitek New Talent Award (2015) and the Lianzhou Festival Photographer of the Year Award (2012). Read more about the artist on her website: https://zheis.com/ 

The exhibition is curated by Yining He (b. 1986), a Chinese curator and researcher focusing on contemporary photographic art, educated at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Read more about the curator on her website: http://www.heyining.com/ 

Friday 28 October at 5-6.30 pm, Galleri Image will host a reception with a remote presentation of Chen Zhe’s exhibition Towards Evenings: My Heart and her award-winning photobook “Bees & the Bearable” by the exhibition’s curator Yining He.

 

Images:

Chen Zhe, The Only Question is How to Endure: Immersing (2017) from the series Towards Evenings, since 2012. Photo credit: Mikel Kaldal.

“Bees & the Bearable” by Chen Zhe