CHen YI

Curated by Michelle Loh

 (+ HOW WAS YOUR SUMMER)

Exhibition Dates: September 17 – November 5, 2017

Exhibition Opening: Sunday, September 17 @ 6-8pm

Free Event: A Conversation with Chen Yi                                                               Saturday, October 7 @ 3-5pm                     

Richard Vine, Managing Editor, Art in America                                                                 Xiaoru Zhu, Curatorial Assistant, Guggenheim Museum

1969 celebrates autumn with new work by Beijing-born painter Chen Yi. In conjunction with the exhibition, 1969 will organize an interview with the artist by Richard Vine, managing editor of “Art in America”, and Xiaoru Zhu, curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim museum.

Chinese-born and New York/Beijing-based artist Chen Yi uses fashion-based images to construct collages depicting a new, hybridized human race.  Meticulously rendered eyes, lips and noses—a nod to realism acting in opposition to expressionistic backgrounds— are interrupted by flat strips of color and punctuated with unexpected thick brush strokes. This continual shift in style between the figure and ground evokes a sense of uncertainty, making his creatures all the more sinister and daunting.

Born in Beijing in 1974, as the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end, Chen Yi earned a diploma at the Secondary Fine Art School of Central Art Academy. Moving in 1995 to Canada with his parents, he studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in a conceptualist pedagogy, a radically different aesthetic climate. After earning a BFA degree, he completed his MFA at the School of Art + Design at Purchase College, SUNY, in 2003. Since then, his work has been exhibited prominently across the USA, Canada and China. 

In the 1969's project space hangs a group exhibition of artworks by Coady Brown, Ethan Green, Kerry James Marshall and Aaron Zulpo replying to the common question asked every September: How Was Your Summer?