Chen Zhe 陈哲

TOWARDS EVENINGS: SIX CHAPTERS (ongoing)
Started in 2012 and ever-expanding, Towards Evenings: Six Chapters is a journey in search of the nebulous space between day and night, light and twilight, the known and the unknown. With a particular focus on the interpretative slippage in between reading and viewing, Chen Zhe materializes her fascination with the topic by probing literary and visual clues throughout history and across culture. While each of the chapters within this interwoven body of work stands individually, taken together they constitute a spatial structure of understanding human responses to the intricate and transient experiences at dusk.

Nothing is more mysterious than the ensemble of procedures, always identical and never predictable, by which night succeeds day. The first portent of these procedures is always a matter for doubt and anxiety. No one can tell what forms will be adopted, on this one particular occasion, by the night’s insurrection.

… I felt that if I could find the right words to describe these ever-changing phenomena, if I could communicate to others the character of an event which was never twice the same, then I should have penetrated or so I felt to the inmost secrets of my profession, … and then I should have gained a vision of the indecipherable forces, the vapours and fulgurations whose obscure conflicts I have only glimpsed vaguely, within the depths of myself.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

I want to share this emptiness with you,
not to fill a silence with false notes or put tracks through the void.
I want to share this wilderness of failure.
The others have built you a highway - fast names in both directions.
I offer a journey without direction, certainty and sweet conclusion.
When the light faded, I went to search for myself.
There are many paths, and many destinations.

Derek Jarman, Garden

THE BEARABLE (2007—2010)
The Bearable is a reflective documentation of the artist's dark, though occasionally euphoric, history of self-inflicted harm in four years.

BEES (2010—2012)
In the aim of portraying the disquieted souls, the wounded bodies and the elusive link between the two, Chen Zhe continued to penetrate the psychological labyrinth of self-realisation by expanding her photographic observations with a collection of letters, dairy entries, online chat histories, quote fragments and scribbles that exchanged between the artist and her subjects.

… if hurt, they breathe
Venom into their bite, cleave to the veins
And let the sting lie buried, and leave their lives
Behind them in the wound

Virgil, The Georgics

CHEN ZHE

THE BEARABLE (2007—2010)The Bearable is a reflective documentation of the artist's dark, though occasionally euphoric, history of self-inflicted harm in four years.

THE BEARABLE (2007—2010)
The Bearable is a reflective documentation of the artist's dark, though occasionally euphoric, history of self-inflicted harm in four years.