CHEN FEI

"I Like to Paint Bad Taste." Chen FeiThe work of Chen Fei (b. Shanxi, 1983; lives and works in Beijing) is part of a new trend in contemporary Chinese art that represents a clear thematic as well as aesthetic departure from the avant-garde art of the 1980s and 1990s. His pictures evince the unconscious influence of the many movies he has seen since he was a child-masterworks and cult classics as well as B movies. A onetime student at the Beijing Film Academy, he created portraits of 202 villains, complete with their characteristic costumes and accessories, from 197 movies ranging from "A Clockwork Orange" to "Ichi the Killer," from "The Shining" to "Kill Bill," from "Hard Candy" to "Bride of Chucky"; the tableau, titled "To Remember Our Comrades By" (2008), makes a spectacular appearance in the book in the form of a six-page panorama foldout. He also wrote a book, "Biographies of the World Movie Villains," in which he describes these evil and bloodthirsty characters with artless sarcasm, as though he were inventorying his family's valuable possessions.The same morbid sense of humor is evident in Chen's more recent paintings. His brush transmutes scenes of human anatomy or death into harmless jokes. What truly impresses him, Chen Fei says, are the rogues, not the upstanding citizens, and the same goes for painting: beauty and good health leave him bored.With an essay by Sun Dongdong.