Junwei Chen (b.1997, Shanghai), working with photography, mixed media, and self-publishing.
The origins of her photographic practice are often inspired by the subtle collisions of everyday life and embark on a journey with those hidden, overlooked, and re-edited visual cues. The absence of the body creates a strong sense of presence in the work, and the metaphorical everyday materiality of the images creates absurd and intriguing frictions that give her a range of new perspectives to interpret the objects themselves and the images themselves, capturing specific trivial details in random scenarios. At the same time, she is also looking at the combination of photography with other media and materials, or rather, the new possibilities of photography itself.
New technologies have created new paradigms.
Everything is maybe not a complete and concrete form, neither am I. Perhaps we ourselves are made up of countless data and bytes. Everything becomes lines, fillers, shapes, jagged teeth. It is two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or possibly multidimensional.
In the digital age, the logic of the existence of technology as an “object” has given way to the logic of “the fusion of things and people”, i.e. the humanity of technology. In fact, we are constantly sharing space with machines and are interdependent on them. In the digital age, the network seems to be constructing the border between humans and machines, but it also keeps making technology more attractive and human beings more intertwined with machines.
About Nail Jelly To A Wall – words by Junwei Chen:
My curiosity about the environment and materiality drives me to capture these momentary and conscious images. They are fragmented, yet like suspended, silent, slow poetic processes that project the fluidity and anticipation of matter. I seek out all the senses produced by everyday life and the city, as well as the hidden, overlooked, re-edited visual cues, which remind me of what was and what is happening now. The metaphorical daily materiality of the images produces interesting or absurd frictions that may be overlooked by most fast-paced walkers, and I value these frictions as they give me a new perspective to interpret the essence of the objects and photography. The impulse inspired by curiosity about the landscape around me makes me unconsciously and habitually tap the screen without too much thought. I hope these images make people slow down and take a moment to rethink how objects, environments, textures, smells, and emotions are represented and reproduced in everyday life.
For each image, they don’t link to each other. And many objects do not appear in their entirety in my photographs. I only capture the part of something to arouse the imagination. I think we are constantly in a state of “in-between,” between certainty and uncertainty, between the abstract and the tangible, between the virtual and realness.
As the name of my work suggests, it is a comical disintegration. Although photography shows that it can hold something in place, there is always something that remains outside of the lens or the prints.
