Chen Wei + Hiraki Sawa

Chen Wei utilizes visual metaphors to highlight ideas in his work. Light of Folding Bed (2009) narrates his memory whereby he used to sleep on similar folding beds during his youth. At times when he had trouble falling asleep, many thoughts would cross his mind while lying in bed. His memory of those nights and thoughts are fragmented, like the broken glass that reflect rays of light. At the same time, he presents an uncanny irony here – while the bed covered in sharp shards of glass has lost its association with ideas of comfort and rest, the precarious glass fragments glisten enticingly.

The scenes in Chen’s photography works are often staged sets that are carefully handcrafted scaled-down models. He utilizes different motifs found from his observation of urban landscapes in China and reimagines the beauty within them, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, landscapes and dreamscapes. 

Hiraki Sawa’s IOTA series (2016) explores the representation of memories and figures, in the form of postal stamps with images of found family photographs taken from albums belonging to his grandmother. Patterns and shapes are carefully drawn on top with white ink, as the artist reimagines time and memory, reworking an imagined past

In his most recent works on paper from the Memoria Paralela (2019) series, Sawa illustrates his perception of time and memory. The drawings are an extension of his video piece, Memoria Paralela (2019), which continues from two earlier video works, lineament (2012) and did i? (2011). The starting point for these works was a friend's loss of memory, which led Sawa to explore concepts of memory and consciousness in the narratives that he created. The drawings feature motifs from Sawa’s surreal world: the lighthouse represents a point in time, while the trumpet relates to radial time.

Sawa experiments with the human perception in his practice, often creating works that diffuse the lines between domestic and public spaces, interweaving the familiar and unfamiliar of the everyday to create dream-like scenescapes and moving images that begets one’s imagination.