Birthday (TanJyoBi)

Concept

Wen is a transdisciplinary artist. An immigrant. A proletariat.

They practice at the intersection of language, architecture, and identity. Wen utilise cement as an industrial vehicle seeking to flatten the hiatus between feudalism to socialism in the contemporary Chinese context. Their pseudo name “hellwood” is a parody of orthodox western mentality which phonetically equals their teenage web avatar in the Chinese language.

Coming from a linguistic background, Wen studied paintings later on with a Shanghainese who spent most of their life in Europe. Paintings are used to open dialogue with creatives of other artistic domains and the ones of larger scale are explorations of spatial transformations via art.

Via the deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural imagery, their visual and sculptural work oftentimes redirect to self-inquiry as a feminine queer that seeks communication at an international level but constantly encounters national, racial, and historical obstacles originating from their identity. Their main question is alienation.