Dreams in Mist, A Flicker of Color
-
A Symphony Frozen in Time 2026, Oil on canvas, 160 × 140 cm -
The new body of work by He Wei leads the viewer into a territory where unease and beauty intertwine. The works present faces and bodies that oscillate between the familiar and the strange, embodying Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny: what is known to us suddenly transforms into an enigmatic otherness. The face concealed by hair or fragmented generates a state of suspension, in which identity seems to slip away, compelling the gaze to search for the unknown behind what appears recognizable.
The visual experience intensifies through the tension between hyperrealism and surreal deformation. Anatomical precision and technical mastery—drawing inspiration from the great masters of the pictorial tradition—combine with formal alterations: symbols displaced from context, suspended proportions, impossible juxtapositions. This dialectic between classical rigor and contemporary freedom creates a trembling sublime, a sense of vastness and excess that recalls the idea of an unreachable infinity in which the viewer perceives reality in an overwhelming way, beyond the limits of ordinary experience.
-
-
He Wei’s works engage with collective memory through subtle and evocative references to German cinematic icons between the 1920s and the 1980s. The figures emerge as elegant ghosts from a bygone era, evoking atmospheres of mystery and refinement. Yet their elegance does not depend on conventional beauty; it resides in posture, attire, and overall atmosphere—in a balance between style and emotional tension.
By juxtaposing realism and deformation, the familiar and the impossible, He Wei creates a visual language capable of conveying contemporary unease. The works compel us to confront what we usually ignore: inner contradictions, fragments of identity, the distance between appearance and essence. The effect is powerful: the visible becomes both mirror and mask, and the viewer is drawn into an aesthetic experience suspended between fascination, disquiet, and contemplation. This is not a portrait, but a disarmed archetype—a presence suspended between the recognizable and the nonexistent, between collective memory and visual invention.
Within this space, elegance and the sublime encounter the uncanny, generating a dimension in which time, memory, and perception converge. He Wei’s faces and figures are familiar yet elusive, precise yet distorted, historical yet contemporary: an invitation to observe what art makes it possible to see beyond the ordinary, at the very heart of human unease.
-
-
Works
-
HE WEI
DREAM IN MIST, A FLICKER OF COLOR
Opening ThurSDAY 5 MARCH
6 p.m.
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY
LUGANO
VIA LUCCHINI 10,
6900, LUGANO
