Artwork Description

Title: Gene Baby
Artist: Chen Feng
Date: 2008
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 70.9 x 39.4 in (180 × 100 cm)

1. Artwork Identification
In Gene Baby, Chen Feng presents a provocative and surreal figure rendered in immaculate detail—an almost otherworldly humanoid clad in glossy pink fetishwear with a single large eye in place of a face. The figure, holding a similarly cyclopean doll, emerges from a background of industrial pipework and shimmering metallic textures. The image is both eroticized and alien, fusing aesthetic gloss with genetic ambiguity, questioning the future of body, identity, and visual culture.

2. Artistic Style and Influences
Chen Feng (b. 1986, Wuhan) is a graduate of the China Academy of Art’s Department of New Media Art. From 2014–2015, he participated in the prestigious Rijksakademie artist-in-residence program in the Netherlands. His works span oil painting, video, installation, and experimental film, with recurring themes of perception, media manipulation, and sensory disjunction. He currently divides his time between Amsterdam and Hangzhou.
The work reveals Chen Feng’s engagement with post-human aesthetics, anime-inflected biomorphism, and cyber-surrealism. His style merges technical precision with absurdist distortion, borrowing from sci-fi, pop surrealism, and digital subcultures. The painting’s hyper-slick finish and uncanny anatomical exaggeration recall elements of lowbrow art, but the conceptual density of its themes connects it to more critical, philosophical contemporary dialogues around biotechnology and desire.

3. Historical Context
Painted in 2008, Gene Baby emerges from a period when Chinese contemporary artists were increasingly exploring hybrid identities in a globalized digital world. As China’s rapid technological advancements sparked both fascination and anxiety, Chen’s artwork offers a speculative fiction-style reflection on what it means to be “engineered” emotionally, aesthetically, and biologically. It also predates but anticipates broader international discourse around post-gender and synthetic identities.

4. Provenance
Provenance documentation can be provided upon contact.

5. Condition and Conservation
The painting is in very good condition. The canvas is taut, edges clean, and paint surfaces retain their vibrancy and texture. No visible signs of damage or restoration.

6. Artistic Significance
Gene Baby exemplifies Chen Feng’s early interest in constructing alternate, engineered anatomies that challenge normative expectations of beauty, gender, and identity. The result is a visually seductive yet conceptually jarring image that pushes viewers into confronting the potential realities of genetic design and aesthetic manipulation. It stands as a highly collectible work from an emerging artist at the intersection of new media philosophy and fine art practice.