Selected Reviews:
The New Yorker
SHEN WEI
by Vince Aletti
The photographer, whose radiant still-lifes of fruits and vegetables steal the "Moveable Feast" exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, shows color portraits and landscapes from his recently published book, "Chinese Sentiment." Returning to China after years living abroad, Wei looked for traces of the country he remembered, so most of his pictures were made in towns, far from the bustle of Beijing. The work has a hushed, intimate quality, and not just because most of his solitary young male and female subjects are seen half-naked and at home. Even the landscapes are rich with emotion—loving and keenly felt. Through June 4.
May 30, 2011
More group show reviews in The New Yorker:
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: FOOD FOR THOUGHT - by Vince Aletti
SELF EXPOSURE
Artscope
Shen Wei: Chinese Sentiment
by Franklin W. Liu
Shen Wei’s aptly-titled fine arts photographic exhibition of 22 evocative and poetically austere, nostalgic images were astutely captured while visiting many Chinese provinces as well as in Shanghai, where he was born 34 years ago.
The images of “Chinese Sentiment” are a provenance of traditional landscapes, juxtaposed with up-close, idiosyncratic flashes of intimate snapshots showing private moments of nude individuals reposing in their room. An unmistakable, stark quietude dominates.
September, 2011
Photo Eye
Book Review: Shen Wei - Chinese Sentiment
by Adam Bell
Avoiding the jingoistic and sensationalist tenor of recent books, Shen Wei's first book, Chinese Sentiment, offers an antidote to the neon tigers and faceless masses of recent photographic work on China. Instead, Shen presents a beautiful dream fugue about contemporary China in the throws of tumultuous change that even its populace hasn't quite fully comprehended.
International Association of Art Critics Hong Kong
Chinese art in Chelsea
by Tina Yee-wan Pang
Shen Wei’s photography resolves this question with neither angst nor confrontation. Shen is an artist who perhaps does not benefit from being discussed in a review that artificially groups together artists of Chinese origin being shown in New York. Born in Shanghai but based in New York, Shen’s work can be seen in two different exhibitions in New York that should be considered together. In Chinese Sentiment at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, the artist addresses the condition of being Chinese only as it relates to his own lived experience, specifically visits that he made to China between 2008 and 2010, with a sensitive and fresh eye. The range of work on view highlights some of Shen’s considerable strengths.
In recent years, the depiction of Chinese landscape in photography has shown the influence of artists such as Edward Burtynsky and Allan Sekula, who use the cool gaze of the lens to cast a critical eye on man’s relationship with, and attempt to manipulate nature. Such images, whether intentionally or not, are also becoming commentaries on the subject of illegal land seizures and the pace of development, a growing source of rural and urban unrest in China. Shen’s relationship to his subjects, in landscape and still lifes seems distanced as if that of a huaqiao (華僑) or overseas Chinese, not quite a tourist’s gaze, but finding interest in images that betray an outsider’s romantic tendencies.
His still lifes have a haunting contrary quality. Nostalgic in subject matter, but evidently modern in approach and composition, these are his best works, and can be seen to greater advantage in Shen’s Table Setting as part of Aperture Foundation’s five-artist commission Moveable Feast: Fresh Produce and the NYC Green Cart Program at the City Museum of New York. Sharply composed and saturated in colour these possess the hyper-reality of Dutch and Flemish still life paintings, generating a similar discomfort with their intensity of sensual experience offered up to the eye. Shen’s portraits have a similarly candid and intimate quality that speak so much to an actual lived relationship that they inspire some of the discomfort and voyeurism that the renowned photographer Diane Arbus confronted her viewers with.
June 11, 2011
Saatchi Online Magazine
Critic's Choice
by Aaron Schuman
Shen Wei‘s series, ‘Almost Naked’, possesses a strikingly accomplished balance of raw intimacy and formal intensity, seldom found in contemporary photographic portraiture. As trite as it may seem within the current climate of cynicism, sarcasm and irony, there is a real sense of emotional connection in these pictures, not only between the photographer and his models, but between the viewer and the viewed as well.
Wei’s subjects are quietly stripped bare before the camera, despite the fact that many of them remain fully clothed. And in a culture more generally enthralled with cool, pokerfaced posturing or explicit, often gimmicky sexuality, the restrained and tender emotional force of Wei’s imagery is remarkably powerful.
July 27, 2007