Exit 3
Chen Wenbo
陈文波
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
149.5 x 200 cm
Notes
Influenced by his discovery of Warhol and Koons, by his academic grounding in realist Sichuan School painting during his studies at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, and by the Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in China, for the last 30 years Chen Wenbo has painted the banal objects of the everyday, from food to furniture to bathroom fixtures. An academic and intellectual painter, his work is also grounded in theories of visuality and in his knowledge of developments in contemporary painting. Critic and curator Huang Du described his work as ‘P-Painting’ with the first ‘P’ standing for ‘Photoshop’: image manipulation and the Internet have changed the way we look at things, he says, so that anything we see is already replete with the visual noise of information: they are ‘embodiments of desire’. These everyday mass-produced objects are rendered with the flat surfaces and exaggerated highlights of the slick advertising billboards appropriated by James Rosenquist in mid-century America. Exit No. 3 and Exit No. 4 were created to illustrate a book called ‘Surface Skin’ (Biaopi), a collaboration between Chen Wenbo and novelist Hu Fang. The bright yellow washbasin with its gold-plated tap is a symbol of luxury – even of decadence – yet the painting is replete with a feeling of alienation and absence: Chen Wenbo’s interior spaces may be altars of consumer glamour yet they are strangely cold and empty.
Accession number
2007.020