The touchable illusion 

Thought having been taught by the traditional Chinese education of fine art, it is still hard to feel the connection between Chen Zhuo’s work and where she has completed her bachelor and master degree──the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Actually they are poles apart, either technically or mentally. Her works are neither stately nor profound. Instead, they are light, delicate, pretty and fashionable, presenting the life style of a healthy girl who are born and brought in the city. There is consistency among her paintings, her age, her experience and her disposition, being not over naïve, nor exceeded sophistication. This kind of life, living smoothly and steadily with few patches, is not inconceivable. Life pressed her without leaving any wound, even the sense of pain is not immediately, while the beautiful but crisp illusion could never blind her eyes.

Majority of Chen Zhuo’s painting came from pictures on internet. Rather than purely from air, Chen Zhuo’s illusion is generated from the decorated and filtered fact, even directly sometimes. Illusion is in the reach distance, rooted in the fact at the moment. Since individual’s involvement with internet has become a common part in daily life, we could call it a new reality instead of virtual world. The shared way of living and communication between Chen Zhuo and her generation leads to the realistic thought and certain connection between each other. Its touch and appearance is unusual from previous experience with the unavoidable feature of ‘flat’ and ‘fast’, evitable though. This is the trial for initiative and sensitivity fronted by an artist.

The pictures still looked all innocent and clean, but the exhibition’s title in english may explains her idea clearer. “A Piece of Another World”, means coming from “another world”, which is bright, tender, simple, but still be “another one”── at Chen Zhuo’s own side. Her pictures are full of contradictions. The fall between the world she facing and the world she yearning makes her conscious about the unreality of fantastic land, but not too alert to withstand or snub it. She prefer to get along with it in this condition half enjoying and half scanning. The “another world” ‘s temperature still be sensated clearly to her, part form memories, part from wishes. However, she can no longer trusts the fantastic world like a teenage girl, starts to reflect her feeling of that fall into picture, no matter comes to narrating or from emotion. From the audience’s point though, those tiny emotion are not grow out tough from the plain and thin paint, becoming a space with depth and volume, can be explored and inquired. As a young artist just starts to create and live, Chen Zhuo always said it herself that she couldn’t build the atmosphere that she really want to reach yet. Her place still is the beginning point of the track she starts to seek.

 Just like the balloons that appearing in her works frequently. Its float, travel and aimless, are free but blind. Doing the chasing action, while don’t know what chasing for, seems the question that faced by Chen Zhuo and her generation, whose life leck s of radical change. In this time’s background, we are encouraged to express  ourselves, to weaken our individual difference in a assimilatory way. Where is the destination, what should to believe and doubt, all becomes questions hard to give a answer which is changing all the time. But she has to plan the future, considers her road to being a professional artist, extends the dimensionality of activities, founds a rationality of art creating──the sincerity to herself can be seen in “the piece of another world”, but to a world more complicated and  abundant, the teenager may should give themselves an answer.