Chen Liangjie (b.1971, Chengdu) was graduated from China Academy of Art, Department of Oil Painting. Like many artists born in 1970s, Chen Liangjie pays attention to society. However, unlike many artists of the same generation, in his works, there is no attitude toward reality.
Chen Liangjie's previous works tried to distance themselves from the audience. This distance comes from both visual and psychosocial levels. He painted distant and open scenes, but compressed the interior space of the painting, which was almost transformed into a plane. The near and far could only be reflected by the big and small on the picture. The crowd is placed in a scene stripped of its everyday context, revealing an abstraction without one’s presence.
In contrast to his past lyrical expression of a certain survival experience, the artist began to select media images and transfer them from news websites to canvases. His paint became thin and transparent, because he was not recreating a painting from a photograph, but trying to recreate it on a canvas in a painting way. He removed the emotional factors of painting and the social meaning factors of image. The emotion was reduced to the feelings, image was reduced to vision, and the authenticity of photo was transformed into authenticity of painting.
