The title of Chen Wei’s exhibition See You Somewhere Sometime comes from an idea after reading the novel Le Temps retrouvé. In the novel French stream of consciousness writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922) uses the First Person to trace a period of lost time hidden in memories. By depicting the details of trivial things and sensory experiences in life, he holds himself separate from the time and space of the immediate narrative scene as if in some out-of-body experience, thereby reconnecting with those past moments. Perhaps it is human nature to be sentimentally attached to the past. Certainly, this approach can be readily identified in the art of Chen Wei.
The depiction of objects accounts for much of the creative content in her work. Old clothes, withered potted plants, faded animal specimens or pictures accidentally discovered when reading, are all essentially insignificant objects from life that Chen uses to remember the past. Objects are steeped in time and the gradual obfuscation of their outlines reflects the artist’s more private and detailed inner landscape, another point of reference used by Chen Wei to organize her own existence condition. If life is essentially fragile and transitory then are not Chen Wei’s desolate and defeated object shapes and Proust’s memories of the details of past experiences merely examples of boundless nostalgia for people and events and a sense of melancholy at being unable to divert ones attention from such things? In the vague scenes Chen Wei constructs from nothing, objects no longer play a passive role, through the interplay of object and viewer, reality and memory they echo the reality of life and subconsciously seek out an unknown place in mind.

Courtesy of Gallery 100