CHEN KE

Her early work often depicted cartoonish young girls, ambivalent avatars for the artist and her generation, raised in an ever-expanding consumer economy. In 2020, she debuted the ‘Bauhaus Gal’ series, filtering images of women from the photographic archives of the renowned German school and movement through her own feelings and memories.

For this exhibition she presents the most recent iteration of this ongoing project, including nearly twenty canvases which imagine and envision the female heroes of this bygone utopian moment. The poignancy of these works is heightened by the context of UCCA and Factory 798, spaces originally designed in the 1950s by a state institute in Dessau, the East German city that was home to the Bauhaus’s final iteration. Chen Ke deepens this connection with the inclusion of archival materials and site-specific elements. The exhibition is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari.