To some extent, Chen Wenling is an artist who obeys the power of sculpture. Unlike many of his contemporaries, his interest in art media is constantly changing, but he insists on in-depth exploration of sculpture art forms. The most striking feature of his works is the shaping of the sense of "expansion". In the characterization of figures and animals, he used generous and solid blocks and a large number of elastic curves, so that the abstract concept of "desire" was conveyed through the volume of the image, the texture of the skin and the lines of the whole body, and there was a feeling of overflowing from the inside out. In his works in recent years, more works or the repetition of a single image are used to form various psychedelic landscapes. People and things, plants and animals, and the whole and details of things are bonded together to form a diffuse and continuous atmosphere, reflecting the gorgeous glory of reality and having a strong illusion. In many cases, Chen Wenling is not sculpting a concrete image, but using the language of sculpture to form a scene full of life and life breath.
In Chen Wenling's works, the exaggerated shapes, round blocks and other formal languages are closely related to the traditions in Minnan folk art. He sensitively captures the visual elements in his life experience and pushes it to the extreme. He once went back to his hometown to attend a temple fair in his hometown. In his extremely enthusiastic folk activities, we can clearly see the local source of Chen Wenling's art, where the overwhelming sacrificial scenes show the power of material and strangely form a visual spectacle. Video and sculpture are obviously related in content and form, which also reveals the real mystery of Chen Wenling's artistic creation in recent years. In this sense, Chen Wenling's art can be said to be "justified".
-Excerpted from Fan Dian's Work Well in 2008.
Chen Wenling is an artist with great imagination and creativity. His sculptures always put animals and people in a relationship, which is achieved through the ambiguous or tense relationship between fanatics and obese animals. He took this opportunity to push the appearance of carnival, sports, strength and desire to the extreme, which not only expressed a kind of secular happiness, a kind of secular humor and a kind of secular fun, but also reproduced the state of people's material desire expansion and endless desire in the consumer society, and then satirized desire, money and body. In his works, such as Happy Life and Heroic Struggle, he holds on to plump people and wild and moving animals. Fat wild boar, fierce dog and sexy and beautiful mermaid form the tension of his works together with those who control them. However, the key point of the problem lies not only in this relationship, but more importantly, he regards these animals as fetishism of adult desires and directly asks us such a rhetorical question, what is desire? Where does desire come from? Obviously, the artist implicitly answered this question through the exaggeration and deformation of sculpture language. Man's desire is nothing more than to gain pleasure in possession and exchange. From the grass-roots standpoint, he insisted on social justice, and expressed his contempt and criticism of irrational desire, vanity, power and violence with a cynical and black humor attitude. Chen Wenling's sculptures not only take realism as the only creative method, but also combine folk images, popular cultural images and historical images on the basis of realism, and treat the sculpture language into an absurd, ironic and humorous black comedy in a concise, simple, frank and exaggerated way.
In "China Scenery", Chen Wenling's artistic concept has changed, which makes his sculpture more experimental and public. He gave full play to his personal imagination, borrowed expressions of appropriation, collage and translation, that is, mixed and transformed natural, traditional and modern images, thus creating a surreal and peculiar rock landscape. Weird rocks are subjectively processed into ambiguous images, similar to ice and snow. It is also similar to a huge deer and a pavilion in a traditional garden, but the bottom is like melted ice, and there are crystal drops flowing on the pavilion. This is a twisted and broken illusion, which vividly reproduces a quiet and ethereal clean world and a sense of alienation from reality. At the same time, the sculpture "China Landscape" makes full use of the smooth curved surface and smooth lines of industrial civilization stainless steel to create a sense of indifference and order in modern society. The forms of melting, flowing and solidification all make people experience the variability of time and the disorder of space. In fact, the artist's sculpture concept lies in his deconstruction and integration of the harmony of nature, the coldness and strength of modernity (stainless steel material) and the traditional poetic beauty. This is also an image metaphor for China society in the transitional period of conflict, overlapping and mixing among agricultural society, industrial society and post-industrial society. The artist accurately grasps the organic connection between cultural concept, historical consciousness and the real world. This is a surreal sculpture integrating nature, tradition and industry, which is interactive and public. When the audience is in the work, the surface of the stainless steel sculpture will reflect the light to the audience and let them feel the strange dream world composed of light and shadow. In this sense, it tries to remind people to re-examine the frame of reference of daily experience and the changes of the whole external environment, and constantly review the subjective consciousness and gain insight into the changes of the objective world. Therefore, through the case of Chen Wenling's open sculpture language, we can further understand and understand the value and significance of China's contemporary art in the transformation process of traditional aesthetics and modern aesthetics.
In 2008, Chen Wenling's new works reached a new height. He boldly and boldly challenged his personal artistic style, further deepened and extended the connotation and extension of art. He can not only analyze the relationship between man and society from a micro perspective, but also directly borrow or integrate elements such as technology, ready-made products, objects and devices, thus forming a new artistic language. At the same time, Chen Wenling's self-challenge also reflects his influence on contemporary art in China.
General criticism of copying and copying works. So, how does Chen Wenling reflect his new intention in his new work? We can feel the change of ideas from the images of his works-he returned to the secular reality from that poetic world, because he can appreciate the strength and depth of artistic language from the complex and dynamic reality. Art not only reflects the process of artists' self-creation, self-display and self-realization, but also plays a "healing" role in artistic aesthetic activities. In other words, art should not only reflect the expressive tension of the artist's formal language, but also reflect the social intervention significance of art, that is, the analysis and criticism of social reality.
In the work "God of Everything", Chen Wenling mixed people with pigs and created a vague face that was not a pig and had no humanity. This language should be regarded as a "post-pop" case of contemporary art in China. On the artistic surface, his works seem to be a kind of popular culture, but in fact, his concept emphasizes that "the most important object of worship is not the spirit, but the material". This materiality borrows the image of a pig regarded as a symbol of wealth and desire in China society, and strengthens the social problems in China's daily life with a social critical attitude-satirizing the characteristics of China's entering the era of crazy material consumption. For humans, pigs are brainless animals that can only eat, and this animal has become the object of human eating. In this sense, his "post-popular" language tries to borrow a folk language to replace capitalist popular culture. Therefore, Chen Wenling's "God of Everything" is not only a fable of scientific genes, but also a fable and criticism of a luxurious materialistic society.
In Fantasy of China, Chen Wenling combined Feng Shui ball, tea art, folk culture and new media art in southern Fujian to create an entertaining and satirical work with interdisciplinary significance, which consists of installations, sculptures, new media and behaviors. This artistic motive force, which originated from folk and folk customs, has constructed a new contemporary artistic language, which has a lot of enlightening significance. Can folklore or folk art be translated in contemporary art? In fact, Chen Wenling has fully proved the possibility of creating a new art through constant artistic experiments.
-Excerpted from Huang Du's What is China Fantasy in 2009.