Weaving of Times

Curator：Nara Huang

Artist: Kebeyo Chen

Organizer: HOW Art Museum

Kebeyo Chen is a Shanghai-based artist with a unique personality and experience. She explores inner growth with bright and bold colors and a smart and imaginative visual style. The works on view at “Weaving of Times” feature some of her signature creative elements such as eyes, braids and seeds. The exhibition opens a door into the world woven by the artist's memories, dreams and imagination through the eyes that shine the sparks of inspiration. In this world, dream and reality, the two seemingly contradictory states, are woven into a kind of surreal imagery. We exist between ourselves and others, between sleep and wakefulness, between the internal and the external, between reason and emotion, between past and future. What makes each and every one of us complete is the intertwinement of all the above, thus “zhijian” – the weaving of times.

Dreams are the playground for the mind, but we are rarely aware of the freedom granted to us by our dreams. A normal dream is much like passively watching a movie screening in your head. In a lucid dream, the dreamer is the writer, director, and star of the movie. Kebeyo Chen is an artist with this dream-weaving ability. She combines the whimsy in dreams with her experiences in reality to create a spiritual work of pomegranate seeds. These seeds are like elves wandering in her dreams, and the braids growing out of the seeds are her tentacles to explore inspirations and the unknown. A dream is by no means something completely detached from reality; it represents an alternative reality that, although not of the same tangible quality as the external world, is no less real than the external world. The dream is a reality that unfolds in an inner space – a world revealed when the outer space is shrouded in darkness. The pomegranate tree at the door of the artist’s childhood house often appeared in the artist’s dreams. Lush green is the color of growth, which means the continuation of the vitality of the pomegranate flower seeds. From sowing to germination, the seeds continue to spread, and strands of braids emerge from them, intertwining and forming the encounter of space and time, bringing together this vibrant and interconnected "ecosystem". In the blue space, the artist draws a metaphor between these containers and people: each person is a container, carrying different things, some light like a plate, some heavy like a filled jar. The braid is like a life link between the containers, connecting the inside and the outside of the container, and the space between the container itself and the outside world.

The artist balances rational thinking with the energy of dreams in the subconscious, weaving different moments of life with each work, interweaving the past and the future with braids, and linking the seeds in memory. The pomegranate tree in the courtyard outside the window in her childhood seems to have traveled through time and space, and reappears in front of us in the form of a dream and reality. Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote "There was a moment of a different life between sleep and sleep". What is between sleep and wakefulness? Dreams, probably.