CHEN FEI | See For Yourself

signed and titled in Chinese and dated 2012 on the reverse

Perrotin Gallery, Hong Kong
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Perrotin Gallery

Beijing, Today Art Museum, We All Love Badasses: Chen Fei and his Friends New Year Party, 15 December 2012
Hong Kong, Galerie Perrotin, Flesh and Me, 8 January - 15 March 2014

“THE MILLENNIUM STORY: CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION” (presented across the Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales) presents a cross-section of young Asian conceptual art after the turn of the millennium. Assembled by a distinguished European collection, the selection of works by acclaimed emerging Chinese and Korean artists reflects a global convergence of artistic views and inclinations encompassing new, complex and highly intelligent art forms with a particular focus on conceptual art. Presented on a circular canvas, See For Yourself invokes a heightened voyeurism that accentuates the narrative power of Chen Fei’s highly graphic aesthetic. Having graduated from the Beijing Film Academy, Chen Fei’s unusual educational background paved the road for the potently narrative and cinematic features apparent in his work. The artist’s meticulously executed paintings are characterised by satire and light black humour, with the often perverted elements contrasting with the immaculately refined quality of his technical execution. In See For Yourself, we peer through a labyrinth of plantation at a naked women who unabashedly meets our gaze. Subverting the classical pose of Venus Pudica, our heroine does not cover her private parts but instead holds a pulsing heart in her palm. Furthermore, her legs are buried within what appears to be a tomb – a motif of death and mortality that jars with the vitality and fertility evoked by the female body (as echoed by surrounding sprouting foliage) and which injects a sudden drama into the nonchalant choreography of the scene. With an indifferent sidelong glance, she seems to question: “Am I what you were expecting? See for yourself”.