Chen Man: First UK Solo Exhibition

With the billing of ‘China’s most famous female photographer’ Chen Man’s début solo exhibition currently on display in Manchester’s Chinese Arts Centre was a proposition that seemed far too intreguing to turn down. A career that began even before her graduation from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art in 2005, has seen her futuristic imagery grace the covers of an international smorgasboard of fashion publications including I-D, Wallpaper*, Nylon and Vogue. Her style is one that embraces hyper-reality, taking conventional fashion photography and giving it a sharp shot of fantasy which draws the viewer into the multi-faceted world that has been created. First coming to prominence through her stunning work for Vision Magazine in 2003, Chen soon caught the eye of the Chinese Art and Fashion circle and has been at the forefront of both ever since. Each of her photographs (if indeed they can be called that) is painstakingly put through a series of post-production techniques which are supposedly all self done with Photoshop and 3-D Max the weapons of choice. Working predominantly with female models, Chen is not afraid of referring to more traditional aesthetic aspects of fashion photography and her subjects articulate brilliantly the desires towards the consumer culture that has emerged in China in the past few decades, although not without their appearance and surroundings being expertly subverted to intensify each of these aspects.

The works selected by the CAC offer a good vareity of her images, both in composition and in her development of what is a now distinctive style. Starting first with her early covers for Vision, the viewer is presented with close-up head shots of models with a strong emphasis on surface beauty, the mood of the pictures dictated and accentuated by striking make-up that upon closer inspection blends into fantasy-laden effects and elevates the portrait to the abstract and even fantastic. As Chen grows in maturity and further refines her dream-like, almost hallucogenic world her canvas broadens and her subjects are removed from their shackles and allowed to ‘interact’ in this futuristic utopia. The ‘Mickey’ series takes the unmistakable ‘ears’ of Disney’s figurehead mouse and uses them to sexualise and displace the symbol, drawing it in to the carefully created chimera that Chen constructs, with a white pallet serving to make the scene seem all the more serene (think Björk’s ‘All is Full of Love

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Vision Magazine Cover | Chen Man ©

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'Preference' Vision Magazine Cover | Chen Man ©

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another Vision Magazine cover | Chen Man ©

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perhaps the most abstract example the of 'Vision Magazine' work | Chen Man ©

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'Black Mickey' | Chen Man ©

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'Double Mickey' | Chen Man ©

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'White Mickey' | Chen Man ©

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from the 'Red Girls' series | Chen Man ©

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'Young Pioneer and CCTV' | Chen Man ©

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'Young Pioneer and Chang E no.1 Lunar Probe' | Chen Man ©

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'Young Pioneer and Three Gorges Dam' | Chen Man ©

The highlights of the exhibition are arguably the excerpts from the ‘Young Pioneer’ series with her recurring character a both dreamy and lucid exploration of the personalities and attitutes of a new generation of Chinese, best encapsulated in the helplessly engaging ‘Young Pioneer & Three Gorges Dam’. The series is reference to the mass youth organisation of the same name which existed during her own childhood under the Communist Party. Each image in the series sees the Young Pioneercharacter (or multiples of her)digitally juxtaposed with images of three Chinese landmarks: Chang’e-1 Lunar Probe ,the CCTV (China Central Television) Tower and, of course the Three Gorges Dam. The images are initially engaging through the incredible beauty of both the subject and image composition but when asked about the thinking behind the series Chen has previously revealed that there is a darker edge to her artworks beyond the opening appearances.

“We’re the generation after the Chinese economic reform; the [societal] development is smooth, but it also brings about many problems that are not very obvious on the outside, I usually use very beautiful imageries to represent the dangerous, hidden problems underneath.”

So there you have it, futuristic fashion photography with a well constructed social commentary encased in the small but delightfully formed space of the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester. The exhibition runs until 7^th April and is free so we highly reccomend you spend an hour getting lost in one woman’s stylised, sometime utopian but consistently enthralling vision of the future. Check out Chen’s site here