Lucky CHEN WENBO

Chen Wenbo was born in 1969. He used to live and work in Chongqing and since 1999, he has been living in Beijing.

He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and promptly became one of the preeminent figurative oil artists in contemporary Chinese art. Chen’s characters, young ladies in pink colours with blue eyes and soft skin, depicted on a black-tiled bathroom backdrop, look like robots or celluloid dolls, between fiction and the reality of a cyberworld. Allegories of the senses, they evoke sight, touch, and the pleasure of the bath. Clones of ideal beauty and ideal youth, the whole world would try to resemble them.

The artist seems to enjoy depicting this atmosphere of youth fairytale, but his paintings question the desire of mankind to control it by artificial means, through colorful cosmetics and drugs. Displayed through many exhibitions, Chen’s work was shown notably at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, as well as in a traveling show that was exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum Bern, and the Peabody Essex Museum, among others. His work regularly appears in museums and galleries exhibitions across China, North America, and Europe.