Working in oil on canvas Chen Han has developed a distinctive painterly style of portraiture, intimate and figurative images evocative of unspecified cinematic stills.
Increasingly estranged human relationships in our age of hyper-information and connectivity, are indicative of a society that outwardly appears to function, but in which personal drama abounds, often away from the judgemental gaze of the wider social order. Chen’s soft, blurred painterly style helps invoke a sense of empathy, and in his complete eschewal of technology in his process, he makes manifest his material artistic presence. Celebrating traditional brushstrokes, visible and emphatic, his pallet is muted and cold, made visceral with flesh-coloured tones. Subjects presented at an apex of an unannounced narrative arc are postured without explanation or source. Quiet and private, these tableaux present averted eyes, and bowed heads. The intimacy evokes unease, as if the viewer intrudes onto troubled and contemplative moments of solitude. The specifics of their anxieties are not revealed, a commonality if found in our common understanding of private states of despair, a place where we can find personal connection and emotional response.
Chen Han was born in 1973 in Shenyang China. He graduated in 2005 from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang where he now teaches Fine Arts. He lives and works in Shenyang and Beijing China. He has been featured in both national and international group exhibitions including at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Shenyang, Hongding Gallery, the M50 Creative Garden Shanghai, and had presentations at International art fairs such Art Brussels and Art Taipei.