{"id":63564,"date":"2018-04-02T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=63564"},"modified":"2018-04-02T11:00:05","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T09:00:05","slug":"faye-wei-wei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/faye-wei-wei\/","title":{"rendered":"Faye Wei Wei on Why Mythology Is a Millennial Concept"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"\"According to Faye Wei Wei, mythology is actually a millennial concept. Usually featuring snakes, thorns and young couples, her paintings are loaded with symbolic modern day motifs, questionable heroes, gender tropes and an appreciation of the surreal. This could be due to her upbringing in London, where every Saturday morning her father took her on a treasure hunt through Portobello market.
\n\u201cWe would wake up at 5am and go together,\u201d she reminisces. \u201cI adored wandering around all the stalls looking at all the beautiful jewels and shining chandeliers, old wooden carved figures, tables made with inlaid wood, antique glass that I couldn\u2019t believe could have survived \u2013 something so fragile and brittle living through time.\u201d\n<\/div>\n
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\n\"\"Childhood is a recurrent theme in the Slade graduate\u2019s art, present in both her fragile brushstrokes and her paintings\u2019 surreal compositions. \u201cMe and my little brother would gather leaves from the hedges that lined the houses of the street where we grew up,\u201d says the 24 year old. \u201cWe would place them in a basket and pretend to dry them out as if making Chinese tea.\u201d These childhood activities have influenced the artist\u2019s oil paintings. \u201cBoy with Snake\u201d (2016), for instance, portrays a boy in green, enveloped by a snake while hovering above a bull and surrounded by golden leaves. In \u201cLion Paw\u201d (2014) two naked boys sporting erections rise in the air, followed by a string of flowers.<\/p>\n
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\nThe concept of performativity \u2013 defined by British philosopher John L. Austin as the potential of speech and communication to realise an action\u00a0interested the artist from a very young age. \u201cWe would build dens and pretend to survive in the forests,\u201d she says.
\n\u201cMy mother would give us a lamb shank each to gnaw on as if we were hunter-gatherers.\u201dThe theatrical aspects of her compositions also stem from her interest in Noh, a regimented and traditional form of Japanese drama commonly incorporating masks, costumes, music and dance.
\n\"\"\u201cWhen we were young, we also had a midnight listening club where we discovered how magical the radio is \u2013 we would then listen very intensely to the classical music and write down what we thought the music was describing, how each note would point to a very specific emotion, melodic, melancholic.\u201d These experiences have led Wei Wei to paint figures, all of which are in fact versions of herself in different guises and wearing different masks.
\nHer huge canvases also play a storytelling role: the bigger they are, the more complex her narratives. \u201cI love the way you have to make your body sweep across in an arch, whereas small paintings are a much slower intimate experience, shifting and pulling the paint around till it forms the glint of an eye,\u201d she says. Wei Wei\u2019s preference for canvases that have the same dimensions as the span of her own body allows for a kind of a bodily warmth and intimacy that\u2019s become her aesthetic trademark \u2013 a calling card which in 2016 earned her the Cass Art Painting Prize for final year Slade graduates.
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\nIn April 2017, Wei Wei staged \u201cAnemones and Lovers\u201d at London\u2019s Cob Gallery, her first solo exhibition. Fittingly, earlier this year she was part of a display with sculptor Zoe Paul in one of the most mythically-rich places on Earth: Athens. Held at Hot Wheels Projects, the show was entitled \u201cMarzanna, Yours Again\u201d, a reference to the eponymous Baltic and Slavic goddess whose toy-like effigies have historically been drowned at the end of winter in these regions to mark the beginning of spring. Alongside Paul\u2019s objects fashioned from wood, metal and stone, Wei Wei presented images featuring little girls\u2019 dolls in eerily cutesy clothes evoking the aforementioned ritual figures. For Wei Wei, this theatricality isn\u2019t just for art\u2019s sake. As with her work in general it\u2019s part of a wider comment on modern culture \u2013 and that\u2019s what makes it so compelling.
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The Slade Art School graduate creates shapeshifting creatures and constructs mythical nirvanas.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":63571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[39,6345,10433,141,687,4272,10434],"class_list":["post-63564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-artist","tag-artwork","tag-faye-wei-wei","tag-london","tag-ones-to-watch","tag-painter","tag-slade"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\nFaye Wei Wei on Why Mythology Is a Millennial Concept Faye Wei Wei on Why Mythology Is a Millennial Concept<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Slade Art School graduate Faye Wei Wei creates shapeshifting creatures and constructs mythical nirvanas\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/faye-wei-wei\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faye Wei Wei on Why Mythology Is a Millennial Concept Faye Wei Wei on Why Mythology Is a Millennial Concept\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Slade Art School graduate Faye Wei Wei creates shapeshifting creatures and constructs mythical nirvanas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/faye-wei-wei\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Sleek Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sleekmag\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-04-02T09:00:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@sleekmag\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@sleekmag\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Verfasst von\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Will Furtado\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Gesch\u00e4tzte Lesezeit\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3\u00a0Minuten\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/\",\"name\":\"Sleek Magazine\",\"description\":\"Sleek is Germany\u2019s leading independent media house\/brand for creativity and innovation located in Berlin the creative capital of the world. 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