Bad Taste Schoeni Art Gallery Until Oct 2
The young Beijing-based artist Chen Fei's series of new paintings are fun. With an exuberant, graphic style, Chen draws inspiration from Japanese anime, yakuza tattoos and Hollywood cinema, among other sources.
His linear style and cartoonish colouring is reminiscent of imagery from contemporary graphic novels to 1960s American hippy art. His wit is refreshing in a mainland arts scene full of dour observations of modern life. Instead, Chen is self-indulgent in his humour, as seen in paintings such as Kung Fu, a horizontal self-portrait, in which he is depicted naked and tattooed - and laughingly balanced on his erect penis. The body, lying against a blank white void, seems to parody the physical prowess of martial arts film stars, a theme echoed in other paintings as Chen revels in his pudgy, less than athletic body. It is this playful lack of physicality that is most enjoyable about his work.
Although it's possible to dismiss Chen as a superficial painter fixated on popular culture, his approach is more authentic than many of his contemporaries. While his work is shallow, eschewing even a cursory attempt at critique or sub-textual innuendo, there is something genuine about the way in which he revels in his love of anime, graphic novels and cinema.
Energetically precise, his lines float across broad white voids or, in the case of the pair of paintings Ping and Pong (above), red stripes, where they look like flags and depict ferocious male and female table-tennis players, satirising China's obsession with the sport.