He Sen

He Sen (何森 Born in 1968 in Yunnan) is quietly becoming a powerful force among China's leading painters. His almost photographic images of women, smoking, sometimes with blurry and whited-out faces are compelling. For years his subject has been young people struggling with the modern world, a generation adjusting to the countries electrified pace. His works are psychological, but also have sharp, graphic techniques and vivid colors. He paints in a variety of styles and also produces ink and pen works. He graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine arts, majored in Art Education in 1989. He lives in Beijing since 2003.

The strokes of He Sen in his oil painting show a reproduction of the ancient painter's masterpiece.

The artist’s earlier works, the press release says “The decadent and sophisticated female figures portrayed were the fiercest and literal expression to confront impact of mainstream cultural trends of the time, especially the anxiety and void in those images projected the artist’s psychological response to that particular context.” I’d call them excuses to paint his squeeze’s barely unexposed vagina.

In the last series, He Sen uses oil paint to copy post-Song ink compositions, splitting each canvas into zones of different brushwork styles or tonal fields. The juxtapositions are engaging and playful. They invite semiotic questions of form and meaning and how classic tropes mutate over time, what that says about us and them and whether we can ever really understand what was there in the first place, if there was ever anything there at all. The TV show Journey to the West raised many of the same questions, but in a much subtler way.

C.V.

Other and former works: