12 june 2025, Flor Linckens
Closing the distance: Shen Wei’s intimate language of closeness
In his solo exhibition 'A Season Particular' at Galerie Ron Mandos, Shen Wei invites us into his universe, where vulnerability, sensuality and stillness come together. His images appear soft and serene, yet touch on themes like longing, freedom, boundaries and physicality. With an impeccable sense of composition, texture and light, he captures bodies in moments of rest, desire, doubt or surrender. Sometimes sultry and explicit, at other times tender and suggestive. Sometimes he is the subject himself, sometimes the focus shifts to flowers or still lifes, but always there is that same sensory intensity.
His photographs are printed with a visible depth that renders skin, fabric and petals almost tangible. That materiality is essential: Wei hopes the viewer will not remain at a distance, but become part of the moment. During the exhibition’s opening, Wei performed "Knee Touching Knee", a piece in which he invited visitors to crack sunflower seeds together. A simple gesture, drawn from a Chinese folk tradition, became a shared, personal ritual that evoked a sense of closeness. In doing so, Wei shifts the focus from looking (a position of power and voyeurism) to participating (a far more vulnerable stance). It fits into a broader line in his practice, in which the act of looking is questioned: who is observing, and from what position? It is also a way of narrowing the distance we experience between one another, and exploring how that distance might be approached differently.
In the exhibition, Wei presents new work alongside images from his long-running series "Self-Portrait", for which he has been photographing his own body since 2009, set in domestic or (at times surreal) natural environments. In these works he explores how memory, identity and emotion relate to the body, and how the human and the natural might mirror each other. In addition to photography, Wei also works with video, painting and installation, always with that same focus on physicality, stillness and connection. He seems to examine how intimacy, desire, fear, fantasy and memory settle into the body. With 'A Season Particular', Wei offers not only a glimpse into his emotional world, but also a reflection on the fluid boundaries between body and landscape, between seeing and being, between self and other.
His painterly sensibility is rooted in part in Renaissance painting, the visual language of performance art, the work of Johannes Vermeer and Diane Arbus, and traditional Chinese philosophy and painting. His many travels across Europe, the United States and Asia have further shaped his visual language.
Shen Wei was born in Shanghai in 1977. He studied photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, followed by a master’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he still lives and works. His work is held in the collections of the MoMA in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing and the collections of Estée Lauder and Agnes Gund. His work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of the City of New York, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Meou Art Center in Shanghai. He was nominated for the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2024 and his work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Aperture, the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, Paris Review, ArtReview and the Financial Times. His most recent publication, "A Season Particular", was released recently.
