The Knapp Gallery is excited to announce “Wide Awake”, artist Gigi Chen’s latest works, for the months of May and June!
Philadelphia, PA – May and June 2008 — The Knapp Gallery is pleased and excited to announce the enchanting artwork of exhibited animator, painter and illustrator Gigi Chen. Chen’s solo exhibition Wide Awake will feature drawings and paintings from her latest group of works, which embody her artistic frustrations through the use of animated characters and animals. These charming works will be on view from May 2nd through June 22nd.
Wide Awake features an array of drawings and paintings which all feature manifestations of Chen’s over-active imagination. Engaged in the frustration of the creative process, Chen finds release by depicting her interior artistic dialogue through the metaphor of the characters her mind creates. These characters, a series of animals, cartoon characters and ‘space kitties’ battle each other for supremacy within the fantastic episodes she depicts in each work.
Chen’s works are simultaneously self portraits and self analysis. She depicts what her mind creates in an effort to understand her inner dialogue. Decidedly lighthearted, these works enthusiastically embody the frustration and excitement of Chen’s artistic process. Fueled by the desire to bridge her fantasies and her realities, her paintings illustrate and inform as well as enthrall her viewers.
Please come join us for this enchanting and delightful show, it will prove unforgettable!
Gigi Chen’s work is fiction, fable and fairy tale exquisitely entwined. It is frolic, mischief, pranks and antics presented in striking tableau. Rabbits, snakes, pandas, squirrels, squid and “space kitties” loom larger than life and appear to nimbly jostle with their human cohorts. Birds and sheep terrorize each other; picnics turn into coffee fights, while giant ants outwit perplexed anteaters. But the fun stops there! It doesn't take one long to discover that within Gigi’s intricately rendered Baroque “cartoon” compositions lie rich and labyrinthine manifestations of the artist’s psyche. More specifically, Gigi’s work is an uncensored, unabashed dramatization of her struggles as an artist, and of her trials and tribulations as her life and her art coalesce into a single entity.
This is “complete self-portrait”—a play-by-play of her ambivalence towards being an artist, and of the struggle and rewards of her daily artistic practice itself. Gigi’s furry friends are personifications—collectively performing for her and performing with her—of her inner workings. They are interchangeably protagonists and victims, winners as well as losers, all rallying together and urging the viewer to suspend disbelief and enter into the surreal melange of Gigi’s fertile imaginations.
Gigi’s beautifully and seductively rendered paintings and drawings are not unlike stills from a film. They are snippets of a chaotic contemporary world. Her characters (whether animal, human, Gigi herself, or her friends) are captured in a “he said, she said” skirmish, all hinting at (and contributing to) disaster imminent. Gigi bravely depicts her desires, distractions, fears, obsessions and relationships in her work, seamlessly bridging fantasy and reality, with a penchant for the bizarre.
Su-en Wong
Artist’s Statement: Wide Awake
My paintings explore my ambivalent feelings about being an artist. My obsession with work and the lack of sleep it causes leads to tricks of the mind. The characters are personifications of these feelings. They are at once sweet, kind and cuddly, then dangerous and shifty. More than just hallucinations, they have become what scientists call pseudo hallucinations; when a stimulus becomes completely real and tangible.
Bio
Born in Guang Dong, China and raised in New York, Gigi Chen attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC. There, she received her MFA in traditional animation and created award winning animated shorts. Gigi has exhibited in New York at Deitch Projects as part of the ARTSTAR reality based television program, culminating in a group show. She has also shown at the Queens Museum of Art in New York and the FUEL Collection in Philadelphia.