Date

2024/2/9 (Fri) ~ 2024/2/25 (Sun)
2024/3/8 (Fri) ~ 2024/3/17 (Sun)

Open

13:00-19:00, Wed ~ Sat, Sunday of last exhibiting week

CALM & PUNK GALLERY is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Japan by China-based artist Xi Chen (陈熹), entitled Mythos in Ink: A Symphony of Creatures and Contradictions.

　Xi Chen was born in 1985 and is a painter and director with a background in independent animation.
He started making short and later feature-length animations in 2013 and is one of the few people who can make a feature-length animation all by himself, from concept art to story, asset production, sound, every frame of animation, and the final DCP. In recent years, he has won several prizes at international film festivals and in 2022 won the Special Jury Award at Seoul Indie-AniFest 2022 for The Chicken Mound.
　
　Xi Chien continues to express himself through a transversal medium of painting, illustration, drawing, figure, and animation. His work reflects personal explorations of love, loss as well as desire, and the ever-changing Chinese society, and even our shifting personal beliefs in the contemporary world.
　In his 3DCG animations, digital technology and the ‘obedience’ and ‘cleanliness’ that lie behind it are pitted against the absurdity of things that are often avoided in the real world, such as ‘chaos’ and ‘secrecy’, along with a plethora of pop motifs.
　
　The exhibition consists of five animated narrative shorts and video artworks produced over the past few years, as well as drawings and figurative works from the 2010s. Please come and see the exhibition.

　As a related event, the film Chicken Mound will be screened again at the Theatre Image Forum in Shibuya for two weeks from Saturday 27 January. The film is a 3DCG feature-length animation produced by Chinese animation director Xi Chen, who wrote the original story, directed, wrote the script, produced, designed the characters, created the background art, animated, edited, and designed the soundtrack, all by himself, and spent three years in production.
　A talk event with Xi Chen and Kanazawa Kodama (contemporary art curator and co-president of Kodamachine) is scheduled to be held on 10 February (Sat).