We played the flute and you did not dance, 2018
He An, born in 1970, Wuhan, China. He lives and works in Beijing.
Experience the atmosphere of a Chinese city with the rhythm of a neon light. This is the experience to which He An invites us. Since the late 1990s, the artist has been transforming electric Chinese characters into a unique emotional and visual landscape.
Sometimes stolen with the complicity of Wuhan's criminals and underground scene, the neon lights that make up He An's material are a true compendium of urban stories. Each work thus becomes an illuminated poem, sometimes a declaration of love to his family, sometimes a simple testimony to deep sadness, always retaining a little of the street from which he comes.
Hijacking the commercial use of neon, anaesthetized by his society, He An restores its brilliance, making it breathe by entrusting it with a fragment of his own life. The fluorescent lines that follow one another write the book of his life. The public tool has become an object of consolation, of memory: a contemporary mausoleum.
His work can be found in international collections such as the Saatchi Gallery (London, U.K), Carnegie Museum of Art, (Pittsburgh, U.S.A), Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (Guangzhou, CHINA) Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne, AUSTRALIA), and the CAFA Art Museum (Beijing, CHINA).