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I MISS YOU ALREADY

H Gallery is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Shen Wei, an artist who is currently establishing an international profile with photographs that explore identity and relationships with an intimate sense of arrested time. I Miss You Already is a selection from a series of self-portraits where the artist’s body gently shapes ideas of self-awareness and the possibilities of change within different cultural contexts.

A provincial Asian city, parkland and public and domestic interiors are some of the spaces in which Wei’s naked body performs subtle actions. The significance of these spaces is altered to suggest personal history, the experience of embodied memories, and tensions between freedom and constraint. Each of the photographs in I Miss You Already is premised on a moment of introspection as the artist explores states of fantasy, anxiety and seduction with the aim of emotional release. Wei has written that the series ‘represents a universal search for our place in nature and society’ and the photographs essentially capture qualities of time, change and difference.

I Miss You Already is also a provocative contribution to the history of photographic representations of the nude male body, eschewing heroic allegories and otherwise conventional formations of masculinity.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei is currently based in New York City. His exhibitions include Museum of the City of New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. His work is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art of New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Library of Congress, Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Chinese in America, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Kinsey Institute. He has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, ARTnews, GQ China, American Photo, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency, the Asian Cultural Council Arts & Religion Fellowship, and the Urban Artist Initiative NYC Fellowship. Shen holds an MFA in photography, video, and related media from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a BFA in photography from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

 

Photographs by Shen Wei
June 5 – August 4 2014
Curated by Brian Curtin