Plum Blossoms Gallery takes great pleasure in presenting 20 x 25, America-based Taiwanese sculptor Chen Long-bin’s solo exhibition. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Plum Blossoms Gallery. For this special occasion, director Mr. Stephen McGuiness has invited internationally acclaimed artist Chen Long-Bin to produce site-specific sculptures using significant art publications of over 40 artists.
Throughout the past 20 years, Chen Long-Bin had explored various materials namely books, phonebooks, and magazines as the core medium for his creation. Since the birth of “Communication I” in 1993, a sculpture of a human head figure created with the help of woodwork tools to sculpt four combined New York telephone books, Chen had been salvaging discarded paper culture to produce marvelously detailed sculptures and installations, bringing forth issues such as politics, cross-cultural communication, and linguistic barriers.
The 20 x 25 exhibition is a celebration of Chen’s 20 years of artistic career and the 25-year-longjourney of Plum Blossoms Gallery as one of the leading supporters of Asian Arts in Hong Kong. This is an opportunity to grasp the reconstruction of art catalogues into significant figures in our course of history. For the first time, Chen did not gather his materials from discarded books but was given the vast storage of Plum Blossoms Gallery’s exhibition catalogues that were published over the last 25 years. Among these were highly-valued art catalogues of paintings by Wu Guangzhong, Chen Yifei,Zhu Wei, Zeng Shanqing, Wucius Wong, C.C. Wang, Ding Yanrong, Chen Jialing and many more. These books that contain astonishing new ideas at the time of production eventually became documentation of a part of Chinese’s modern art history.
Born in Taiwan in 1964, Chen received a BFA from Tung-Hai University in Taiwan and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since his first exhibition, he has received numerous prizes in Europe, Taipei and Japan. His works are continuously exhibited and collected in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong. Chen Long-bin currently resides in New York and will be present at the exhibition opening reception on 27 September 2012.
