样板间：一件自己的房子
Last sunday, Chart Contemporary invited Chen Ke to display “A Room of One’s Own,” a temporary installation that is the fourth in an on-going series of Open Houses, art interventions in some of Beijing’s unique spaces. Chen Ke’s room was a tiny closet of a room in a damp underground maze of dwellings near Lido Hotel. The space seemed perfect for Chen Ke, whose relentless and non-apologetic embrace of the dainty and quaint has come to personify the “cartoon” style of her age-group, but whose open embrace of feminism seems just as subverted as the room itself. Chen says that the idea was inspired by Virginia Woolf, but that the safe space atmosphere of cleanliness and respite was a reaction also to the city’s migrant population.
The objects in the room were embroidered by “aunties,” who followed the artist’s instructions and sketches to the thread.
Hanging kerchiefs do not a clean wall make!
The hallway leading to Chen Ke’s room, a dismal foyer for the many who live below.
“Dog Days”
The Open House also afforded a look at the secret lives of people inhabiting the city’s many underground villages. Or perhaps, their boyfriends?
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