HE Wei: Dusk

For what we see has risen as if from beneath the earth into the gold light, sinking blue earth, rising orange light, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, immeasurable, and filled with yearning. Tragedy sits in sublime rapture amidst this abundance of life, suffering and delight, listening to a far-off, melancholy song.1

——He Wei

Reflexion Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “Dusk” by He Wei, featuring for the first time seven new large-scale paintings created since 2023, which continue He Wei’s exploration of abstraction as a way to present figurative mental landscapes. A series of fluid structures and continuous layered spaces evoke the viewer’s perceptions. These spaces summon images and emotions and yet reject univocal readability. Inspired by the aesthetics of 19th-century European Romanticism, and rooted in the Chinese concept of painting since the Song Dynasty, in which landscape has been regarded as the “landscape of the mind”, the artworks indicate the oneiric sequences of memories, nature, colours, images, and narrative scenarios condensed in the artist’s and our common spiritual landscape.

Static straight lines and watery waveform arcs move motionlessly across the canvas. Its movement is deep and implied, a middle domain between lucid reality and hazy illusion. Colours bleed into colours, slim and smooth. Layers of thin, translucent water-based paint interact with turpentine oil. Using brushes, roller, squeegee, spray can, and glass panel, the artist abstracts the materials, allowing the elements of the painting, such as form, movement, and space, to increasingly take shape in the tension of uncontrollability and order.

The marvelous flow of liquid materials tests the variable boundaries between fusion and destruction, and in it, we observe traces of the workings in matter and the dynamic forces that transcend the visible form of the world. Pale, shimmering blocks, swirling bubbles, and splashes of stippled paint emerge between the textures and grooves in the darker parts of the canvas. The randomly generated texture gradually forms the language of painting through rational sifting and repetition. Successively, the fractals of the liquid map into ordered and solid geometrical structures that stretch outward and upward, and again lose focus in the twinkling of an eye.

Over the last decades, some contemporary art practices attempted to dissociate the representational mechanism of meaning generation from the idealised artistry through deconstruction. The issue of “process” with the uncertainty, randomness, and timeliness of the creative process, which have received widespread attention, have become contradictory elements in He Wei’s creations. With his expression, the artist achieves enchanted and appealing creations while continuing to activate his pictorial language in adapting and confronting them.

He Wei was born in Xinjiang in 1980 and graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Oil Painting Department in 2005. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Recent exhibitions include: He Wei: Dusk, Reflexion Gallery, Beijing (2024); tone, Reflexion Gallery, Beijing (2024); New Works by He Wei, Saisen Art, Shanghai (2022); He Wei Solo Exhibition, ShanghART M50, Shanghai (2021); Gemeinsam Fremd Sein, Q21 MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria (2021); A Composite Leviathan, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (2020) & Luhring Augustine, New York, U.S.A. (2019); Dual Solo Exhibition of HE Wei & TANG Maohong, ShanghART Beijing (2019); He Wei: Primary Colour, C-Space, Beijing (2016); He Wei: Contradiction, Telescope, Beijing (2015); He Wei: Place Beyond Touch, Art Seasons, Beijing (2010); New Interface 3 – Searching the Future, Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai (2007).

Text: Fan Yang

1.      Adapted from Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (20:3, P.149-150)
2.      Dusk is the period when the sun is still more than 6 degrees below the horizon, when objects can still be recognised but there is not enough light for outdoor activities.