Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Our friend Chen Fei, born in 1983 in Shanxi Province, is not the type to indulge in conceptual lacework to whisper convoluted theories in your ear. No, this graduate of the Beijing Film Academy prefers to slap you with images that hurt both the eyes and the mind. And that’s for the best. In a contemporary art world where mediocrity often disguises itself as complexity, here is finally an artist who fully embraces his desire to shock, destabilize, and above all, make us reflect on our own contradictions.
Let’s start with his technique, that famous “super flat” approach he wields like a well-sharpened katana. His deliberate flatness is not an easy way out but a philosophical choice that strangely resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s theories on the surface as the site of events. When Deleuze spoke of the surface as the “boundary between things and propositions”, Chen Fei turns it into a playground where tradition and modernity, East and West, high art and pop culture collide. His paintings are battlefields where references clash with the violence of a kung fu film.
Take “Natural History” (2016), a composition where a woman in sportswear stands in the middle of an improbable bestiary. The artist joyfully blows up the codes of classical painting, creating a kind of postmodern cabinet of curiosities where an armadillo casually mingles with a penguin, as natural as a WeChat conversation. The clinical precision of his line only heightens the absurdity of the scene, as if Albrecht Dürer had switched to manga illustration after a drunken night out.
But Chen Fei is not just another iconoclast. His still-life series, presented at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2021, reveals a deeper ambition. These horizontal compositions, which at first glance seem to belong to the tradition of 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings, are actually caustic commentaries on our relationship with consumption and accumulation. Objects pile up with manic precision: yuzu sit next to red bean buns, soy sauce bottles converse with animal skeletons. This accumulation echoes Walter Benjamin’s ideas about collecting as a form of resistance against the standardization of the modern world.
In “Painting of Wealth” and “For Breadth and Immensity” (2019), he pushes this logic to the absurd, creating gargantuan feasts where food becomes a visual language to speak of the excess and emptiness defining our era. Lychees shine like jewels, dumplings stack like monuments to overconsumption. It’s as if Arcimboldo had gone shopping on Alibaba.
His series “My Morandi” (2019) is particularly clever in the way it twists the Italian master’s aesthetic. Half-empty soy sauce bottles and rice vinegar flasks replace Morandi’s refined vases, creating a transcultural dialogue that makes purists cringe and insiders grin. This is where Chen Fei excels: in his ability to forge unexpected bridges between cultures while dismantling the established hierarchies of the art world.
The artist doesn’t stop there. In “Remaining Value” (2019), he places Piero Manzoni’s infamous “Artist’s Shit” can next to various types of agricultural fertilizers. The commentary is as subtle as a punch to the gut: Western conceptual art is put on the same level as manure, an equalization of values that echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on social distinction and aesthetic judgment.
This first phase of his work, centered on deconstructing pictorial codes and subverting cultural hierarchies, reaches its peak in pieces like “Big Model” (2017). In this monumental canvas, a tattooed Chinese male nude adopts the pose of Michelangelo’s David against a turquoise floral wallpaper backdrop. Western art history is digested, regurgitated, and transformed into something resolutely contemporary and Chinese.
The second theme running through his work is that of fragmented identity in a globalized world. Chen Fei portrays himself with fierce self-mockery, making himself the perfect guinea pig to explore the contradictions of contemporary China. In “Cousin” (2019), he depicts himself in Supreme underwear and Converse sneakers, checking his Huawei phone. The scene is a condensed geopolitical and cultural tension: Western brands barely cover an Eastern body, while Chinese technology serves as the interface to the world.
This exploration of identity resonates particularly in his obsessive passion for sofubi, those soft vinyl Japanese figurines he collects by the thousands. This collection, which occupies an entire room in his home, is more than just a collector’s quirk; it becomes an artistic material in its own right, appearing in his still lifes as totems of a new consumerist spirituality.
In “National Conditions” (2017), he takes this reflection on cultural identity even further. The scene depicts a Chinese family in an American 1960s living room, with an African-American child approaching the mother while a bust of the artist watches over the scene. It’s a painting Edward Hopper might have created on acid, a hallucinated vision of the American dream through the lens of contemporary China.
His most recent work, “The Road to Success” (2024), presented at the Centre Pompidou, masterfully synthesizes these concerns. The juxtaposition of a 1990s staircase with a modern escalator becomes a visual metaphor for China’s societal transformations, but also a reflection on the illusion of progress. The artist even stages himself as a “brand creator”, pushing self-irony to the point of turning himself into a product in the grand supermarket of contemporary art.
What makes Chen Fei’s work so striking is that he wields irony without ever falling into cheap cynicism. When he depicts scenes of everyday life, as in his series on morning markets, he does not pass moral judgment; rather, he presents us with a distorted mirror of our own contradictions. His cinematic training is evident in every painting, not only in their meticulous composition but also in their ability to suggest broader narratives.
Western critics like to read his work as a critique of China’s consumer society. It’s an easy reading, too easy. What Chen Fei shows us is that the distinction between authenticity and artifice, between tradition and modernity, between East and West, no longer holds in a world where an artist can collect Japanese figurines while quoting Michelangelo, where a soy sauce bottle can become as iconic as a Morandi vase.
His art is ultimately a celebration of impurity, in the noblest sense of the term. He rejects easy categorizations, clear-cut divisions between high art and low art. His work is a living testament to what contemporary Chinese art can be when it fully embraces its hybridity: neither entirely Western nor strictly Eastern, but resolutely contemporary and personal. In an art world where so many artists take themselves too seriously, Chen Fei reminds us that irreverence can be the highest form of artistic sincerity.
