| Chen Fei’s pink-skinned, sausage-bodied characters couldn’t be rounder, pudgier or more indulgent in the likes of food, material objects and sex. Each and every one of the aritst’s works makes a point to disgust and repel the viewer, yet each is also outfitted in baby pink and glossy pearls. To sum up the overall theme of the artist’s oeuvre with the word “excess” is to state the obvious, but it is also an understatement. The figures might be “cute” in their unapologetic, full-bodied chubbiness, but they also lack any discernable means of seeing, smelling or listening to any and all elements of the outside world. |  |
Chen Fei – Whitney May
Chen Fei’s pink-skinned, sausage-bodied characters couldn’t be rounder, pudgier or more indulgent in the likes of food, material objects and sex. Each and every one of the aritst’s works makes a point to disgust and repel the viewer, yet each is also outfitted in baby pink and glossy pearls. To sum up the overall theme of the artist’s oeuvre with the word “excess” is to state the obvious, but it is also an understatement. The figures might be “cute” in their unapologetic, full-bodied chubbiness, but they also lack any discernable means of seeing, smelling or listening to any and all elements of the outside world. They have no eyes, nose or ears of which to speak, and, consequently, only internal, selfish, bodily needs register with these creatures at all. In other words, they can only take—eating and imbibing everything within arms’ reach, without even discerning exactly what their inevitable intake is. When sliced open and exposed by their own accord, dripping red lipstick, silver rings and strings of pearls spill out of the characters like the intestines that they didn’t even realize had a function or value until they fell to the ground, rendered useless thereafter. In retrospect, is such life on this earth, as depicted here, really worth preserving, especially if there are no ears to confide in or even eyes to trust?
Clearly, the artist makes an immediately provocative and compelling statement about the status of contemporary consumer-driven society in his rose-colored series, but this declaration of the artist’s perspective is best demonstrated through his own words. Chen Fei explains the idea behind this series, saying: “Our society’s previous concepts and ideas about morality, life and value have encountered negation in this day and age. Those without ideals or beliefs, through their panic and bewilderment, are led down the road to a mad chase after worldliness and fortune.” This ugly chase is perhaps nowhere better represented than in the artist’s “Beyond Satisfaction” series. Like Chen Fei’s creatures, modern man’s belly, as well as his safe, commonly overflows with surfeit. Consuming to the limits of both body and spirit is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary society, and the artist points to this fact in hopes of an even more widespread backlash—one to end all greed.
In his work Beyond Satisfaction No. 1, Chen Fei takes indulging in one’s most carnal desires to the extreme. Here, one of the artist’s typical forms balances the guts-spilling carcass of another of his kind. Projecting an image of stability, the figure is not only slit open at its side, but drips blood from the open wound where its dislocated head used to be. It’s no matter that this body no longer has a head or brain upon its shoulders since the skillful balancer of this newly decapitated mass of flesh only desires to consume it, and without discrimination. Not only does the mouth of the live figure attempt to consume this carcass whole as if for food and sex at once, the pose of this figure—hands on hips while leaning back casually—suggests that this act of indiscriminate slaughter and cannibalism is nothing special, for it is merely an everyday occurrence, apparently.
In another work, Beyond Satisfaction No. 2, the artist depicts a gruesome scene of a newly slashed open, overstuffed body with its quickly overflowing insides placed on display by the over-indulgent creature itself. Although his head is no longer in view, intestines full of lipstick, pearls, silver and gold are. Additionally, the creature’s pudgy hands hold wide the opening, gesturing if only to declare: “Here is the climax of my entire existence.” Apparently everything that this grotesquely squat version of the contemporary consumer has ever done is imbibe, devour, buy and take, and this image depicts the moment at which he puts the whole of it on show to the outside world.
Since this consumer’s goal in life is to accumulate and internalize various forms of material wealth, slitting open one’s gut to the world can only serve as a kind of spectacle of the achievements attainable through such unbridled consumption. It is an act that declares the very limits of satisfaction have been reached and breached. And, apparently no one who achieves this kind of fulfillment should do any less than to sacrifice oneself in an attempt to display this climactic moment to the rest of the world. In the end, then, after consuming throughout the entirety of their existences, this could be Chen Fei’s characters’ singular act of “giving back.”
If the characters here slit open their bodies full of long-accumulated wealth, perhaps the act is not actually intended to provoke jealousy, but instead to incite change. In this way, each and every viewer of these works is fortunate to experience the grotesque figures of Chen Fei’s oil paintings—if only to receive a magnified glimpse of their own nature. After all, it might just prevent them from a similarly pearl-strewn, rose-colored and greed-driven fate.
