EP13｜The Light of the City — the young artist Deng Wei on The Great Artist, dissecting the symptoms of the city through photography and hand-drawing

Turning his gaze upon the city's bizarre and grotesque, distilling his reflections between image and brushstroke

[Taipei] In Episode 13 of The Great Artist, the podcast presented by DE Global Art Agency, the young artist Deng Wei joins the programme. In this episode, he shares how he employs the two mediums of photography and hand-drawing as instruments for knowing the world and dissecting the age, distilling his profound observations of the city into one thought-provoking work after another.

Deng Wei is a young artist adept at photography and hand-drawn creation. With a singular perspective, he explores and comes to know the world through different artistic mediums, distilling his reflections on all he sees and hears into his works. For him, creation is not merely a visual presentation, but a way of observing, questioning and responding to reality. Young and acutely perceptive, he has chosen to extend the antennae of his art towards the arena closest to the lives of his contemporaries — the city.

In Deng Wei's work, photography and hand-drawing play mutually complementary roles. Photography captures the city's true cross-sections in an instant, freezing those fleeting scenes and crowds; hand-drawing settles and distils his reflections upon and interpretations of what he has seen, infusing the cold image with a subjective warmth and point of view. The two mediums illuminate one another, so that his work is at once an objective record of the city and a subjective diagnosis of the symptoms of modernisation.

Deng Wei turns his gaze upon the bizarre and grotesque phenomena and the myriad people within the city, dissecting the inescapable connections and symptoms within the contemporary tide of urbanisation. In an urban jungle of towering buildings and breakneck rhythms, the estrangement between people, the swelling of desire, the alienation of life — all become subjects of his attention and inquiry. His lens and brush record not merely the prosperous surface of the city, but pierce through that surface, pointing directly at the manifold predicaments and contradictions that modern people face in urban life.

In this episode, Deng Wei shares his creative philosophy and methods of observation. He speaks of how, as a young creator living within the city, he is both an observer and one of the observed; and it is precisely this dual perspective — at once immersed and detached — that allows him to leave behind, for this age, a sincere and profound questioning, with a clearer and more incisive eye.

To attend to social issues through imagery is precisely the creative depth that The Great Artist holds dear. With its perspective of academic legitimacy and an international career, the programme accompanies young creators such as Deng Wei in transforming keen observation and independent thought into an artistic language capable of dialogue with the world, and in advancing towards a broader stage.

The Great Artist EP13 is now available on Apple Podcasts, SoundOn and other platforms, with a running time of approximately 31 minutes. Listeners are warmly invited to gaze anew, through Deng Wei's lens and brush, upon the cities we take so for granted.