The image appears unmistakably familiar- the ideal skinny woman, donning covers of women’s magazines or selling men’s products. However, the women here are not those envied and fetichized in turn by men and woman, they are not images, but vulnerable, real selves of the woman they are.

Shi Wei was born in Hubei in 1965 and went on to complete his Master’s at the Oil Painting Department at the Hubei Academy of Fine arts. He currently teaches at the Beijing City University. His works have been exhibited in Korea, Hong Kong and Beijing.

Shi Wei’s oil paintings and sculptures in his ongoing Skinny Beautiful Women Series comment on the modern woman, noting the growing trend of openness in female Asian sexuality, nevertheless caught up in the need to conform. This ambiguity that the female experiences, is at the very core of the artist’s exploration in this series.

Mulan Gallery owns a fine selection of Shi Wei’s works that include oil paintings as well as sculptures, from this current series of works. The women here too are in Shi Wei’s usual mould, caught in a fervent of lust, desiring and being desired for their ‘perfect’ bodies.