Perrotin Shanghai is pleased to present Chen Ke's solo exhibition Bauhaus Gal / Room. Representing the mental space, to the artist, a room both shelters and confines. The exhibition features two seemingly divergent pictorial series: Bauhaus Gal (figurative portraits on canvas) and Room (abstract shaped aluminium plate), created by the artist simultaneously between 2020 and 2021. The portraits on canvas seem to be in past tense, providing a historical background, while the shaped aluminium plates resemble more of real objects. From the aspects of 'pictures' and 'facts', they work together to show the value she advocates for women: having the right of choice, being independently minded, unwavering and creative. The juxtaposition of the two series suggests a factual, evidential creator-product connection between the girls depicted and the specific objects. Ever since Frida Kahlo in Frida, A Woman (2013), the artist and poets in Cover (2015), Marilyn Monroe in Dream and Dew (2016) and Helen Torr in Anonymous Woman Artist (2020), she has chosen the creative individuals for the subject of her painterly creations, in each and every solo exhibition.

The Bauhaus Gal portraits are based on the zeitgeist-charged archive photos of the Bauhaus. Chen Ke prefers the classical conventions when delineating the faces of these pioneering young women of modern times. Immersed in their own world and in deep thought, they are completely oblivious of the gazes from the outside. While transforming into painting, these archive images undergo 'physical implants' so that the painter can relive certain moments in life and recollect involuntary memories such as smell, light and touch, thereby reviving those black and white figures in these historical records. Her awareness of medium from years of painting practice (seeing in abstraction) helps her to establish a link between the ancient spirit and contemporary sentiments. In the portraits, one sees the physical sensation of the early renaissance fresco painting transposed, imbricated on the close-ups of avant-garde films. Again, in the two central figures complemented by the distinct elongated shadow on the staircase in Haus am Horn No.1, she invoked from her student days the mental impression of Evening Prayer by Jean-Francoise Millet, to fix the moment showered in the last ray of the day.

Chen Ke purposefully blurs the boundary between painting and photography, being and acting. Her portrait paintings restore to the moment just before the shuttle clicked, a moment in the past marked by the form, the props, the gesture, lighting, the look, and the camera shot, despite the fact that it is just her own interpretation, a type of restaged mise en scene. Her practice operates in the space between imagination and chemistry. Like photography, her paintings capture light and shadow to express congealed time. The insight reveals that her practice has never been in the pursuit of realism, nor for the sake of painting. One may say that the figurative and abstract language in the two series both serve in constructing a mind-scape, in and outside the pictorial field. The shaped aluminium plates were made in a state of purged subjectivity, or in other words, never before has she been so devoted to improvisation, much as the Bauhaus Theatre of Totality demands, to actively give up logic and intellect to be employed 'on an equal footing with the other formative media'.¹ These small scale works, taking the gallery space in its entirety, grow groups, break through the picture frames, connect with the movement of light and shade in real-time and include the surroundings and walls in the visual field. Bauhaus Gal and Room exist in fictional territory but at the same time they are unique and truthful creation on their own. Chen Ke plots her art inside her own script, involving the medium of painting in the mutual generation of experiences and memories to endeavour an open-ended development. Spectators in the hall may contrast /judge for themselves the experiments behind the two styles, or perhaps just forget about painting altogether by taking a stroll in the spatial-temporal set-piece as if browsing through a picture album.

*1. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Theater of Bauhaus (1924).

Press release courtesy Perrotin.