He An’s light sculptures are made up of characters stolen – with the complicity of the local mafia – from the signs that light up his native city of Wuhan. Using these stolen ideograms, often damaged by the weather and the course of time, the artist recreates the names of people who are dear to him. We see the name of his father, a martyr of the regime, and of a Japanese erotic actress, the illicit heroine of his youth when her banned videos circulated secretly in China. He An’s work is autobiographic and obsessive: he offers us an approach to contemporary Chinese society that is both intimate and subversive. The artist’s style falls somewhere between illegality and investigation, bringing us “a breath of authenticity, a
slice of raw reality” as Jérôme Sans puts it. Representing a new generation of emerging artists whose works explore cultural prohibitions and taboos, He An surprises us with his capacity to combine the tenderness of a gaze with the irony of criticism.!