Liu Wen Drawing

Three years ago I created a series of portraits titled "Smells Like Teen Spirit" [2015-2018] which became a work in progress and has more than 100 portraits. "Liu Wen" is one of its artworks. The whole series is an analysis of celebrity endorsement, of the construction of the self in mass culture, of the proliferation of scopophilia and voyeurism as well as of the pathological search for virtual popularity with the increasing strength of the social networks. In this series I question the photographic image and its uses in mass media, advertising and fashion. These artworks stress the transparency of the persona to the roles and situations which form the public image-world, the one cannily projected first by cinema and then by fashion magazines - the pictures that media provides through which social types are generated and internalized. “Smells like Teen Spirit” it’s about the resonance between media narratives and fantasy projections. The selection of the dimension of the artworks (29,7 x 21 cm) is linked to the format of the personal portable computers (the greatest tool of communication nowadays) and their installation in space establishes a parallelism with the exponential expansion of images within the virtual networks and how the images are visualized by the masses. This series matches the proliferation of images with a proliferation of persons and enhances the fact that personal opinion is regulated by public roles. It is an homage to Andy Warhol’s painting of Chanel nº5.