Na Wei

Na Wei (那危 Born in 1992 in Liaoning Province). Currently lives and works in Beijing.

He held his solo Blue and White•Isolated, thus making his debut as a leading artist of new generation of the 80s, with his unique concept of art and media for artistic expression.

One has to keep two points in mind when appreciating Na Wei’s works. On one hand, his works can be taken as his tentative effort to generate new concepts of art and new artistic language for expression by blending various elements or forms (contrast, confrontation, juxtaposition, for instance), or in other words, “blending” them in a contemporary context of overwhelming development of science and technology along with the Chinese cultural tradition which highly values compromise over conflicts. He calls the combination of elements, styles and concepts “hybrid”. On the other hand, he prefers to challenge stereotyped thinking patterns by creating unconventional everyday experiences in order to understand the cognitive distance of people, events and objects. Like a magician, he keeps changing the elements in the painting in a balanced way, challenging our set thinking patterns and cognition of people, events, objects, and our logic. In his paintings, “truthful lies”, told by perfect and consummate techniques coming on end, along with the seemingly contradictory and conflicting elements, challenge our ready experience and take us to a richer world of imagination. It might be such interactive and open means of understanding that sets the tone of his artistic reality, and it is, to some degree, closer to what he intended in his works.

Painting is the result of gazing, but more importantly, an artist’s rhetoric. The experience from gazing usually tends to be considered as “reality” and as the standard for the observation of the world. Artists, however, often challenge such “reality”, i.e., to reveal the reality under the cover of the so-called “reality” by means of a rhetoric of vision. It is probably the logic that Na Wei always adheres to in his art practice. From the metonymic use of “blue” and “white” to identify the hospital gown to the intertextuality between the color and realism involved, using rhetoric to express the result of gazing has always been his way, or approach, to reflect on our reality. Even the recent triptychs reveal his unique rhetoric from gazing to view the “color-silk” medium, direct representation of the property of tin-tube pigments along with the intertextuality between “blue” and “white” and realism. Beneath such rhetoric lies his perception of the world as an individual. Na Wei is full of fantasies. Keen on what is novel, fashionable and modern, he is greatly intrigued by the “civilization” and “progress” brought by modern science and technology. He will take the audience on a journey of proactive visual experience and reflection about “art at present and in the future”.

C.V.

Other and former works: