Chen Ke is born in 1978 in Tonjiang, China’s Sichuan province. She’s graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, where artists had many opportunities to explore their emotions and instincts.
This free environment, alongside cartoons, fairy tales and comics, helped her to build her identity as an artist.
After participating in numerous national and international exhibitions, she worked on a variety of media, including painting, sculpture and fashion design.
Chen Ke is recognized as the most representative artist of the New Generation of Cartoon of China.
Background
Various images of little girls, representing the core of human nature, flow like a thread through the works of Chen Ke.
Although references to the art of comics are evident, when one analyzes her works in more detail, they become visible elements of style of Western masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, as well as the influence of traditional Chinese paintings, creating an exciting tension.
Being eager to experience Chen Ke often surprises her viewers. Not only does she produce her own paper, she embroiders canvases with beads, but she also applies oil paint to stretch cotton fabrics that are popular in her childhood days.
Chen Ke sad girl
Chen Ke is considered the most representative artist of the new generation of Chinese artists. Her melancholic paintings, which express the loneliness of growing up as an only child, show digital images made of bright and colorful light from her kaleidoscopic and dazzling imagination.
That’s why the artist says: “My characters are somewhat sad, isolated and powerless and this is exactly how I feel sometimes. My art is as real as my spirit.”As classical artworks of Chen Ke, almost every piece of work shows a little girl with a round nose, who is lost in depression, limited to herself, living in an unreal space, and seems to keep a distance from the human world.
Like porcelain paintings
Usually, the sad girl takes up the center of the whole artwork. With the full expression of the blank as well as the grain like porcelain paintings, the artist fully shows the opposition of the reality. A reality that buries the audience in the waves of the sense of unknown sadness. The sad girl seems to be jumping between the virtual world and the reality, which makes the audience lost in the endless loneliness and long distraction.
Chen Ke and Beijing
In her first two years in Beijing, she felt lonely and what she could do was to paint and put her moods into the painting. She believed this is the reason why many people think that the girl in her painting was actually her self. And the girl in her painting grew up with the growth of the artist. She believed her art appeared from her daily life, so she hoped art could enter the daily lives of people.
Chen Ke and Fashion
She thought fashion and art have no differences at the top point. She has cooperated with many fashion brands. In 2008, Fendi invited Chen Ke to join the Fendi special handbags Baguette Anniversary commemorative edition series; she designed a handbag for the series. In 2014, Chen Ke designed for the Vogue FNO series to celebrate the ninth anniversary of Vogue magazine.
