The Universal and the Transcendental in the Works of Chen Zhe

In his photography series Eternal Ephemera, Chen Zhe investigates the relationship between celestial bodies and living beings. One photograph portrays a majestic mountain by the sea, whose body resembles a mother goddess poised at rest. In another you see a spider under the moon, busy building an ambitious web that is disproportionately large and delicate like an object of sophisticated technology, in yet another a cave of ancient stalactites seems to expose the organs of a giant, as luminous as the shining stars. The latest video You Are a Circle, Expanding created in ultra-slow motion and accompanied by sound that extends across the exhibition space, takes the public back to the origins of life: in a colossal cavity, under a foggy red moon, the fingertips slowly immerse themselves in the ripples that proliferate and disappear, resonating in the present moment with fetal movements, breaths, buzzes, whispers. The artist is interested in profound times: times of ancestral memories, prophecies regarding the future and destiny, and a self that is only encountered in dreams. The title of the exhibition comes from the poem Insomnia by Jorge Luis Borges: “Tonight's universe is as vast as oblivion, as precise as fever”. Chen Zhe's work responds to the dialectic between memory and oblivion.