Happiness Survival: Visual Memories of Chen Haiwen's Journey

Author: Chen Minghua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-08-01
Features: The theme of "happiness and survival" achieves a unified integration of the individual, the crowd, the nation, and the region. This tracking and care for the state of human survival can be seen as a kind of religious devotion. The compassion conveyed in the images evokes people to reflect and re-examine the concepts of "happiness" and "survival."
Chen Haiwen's peak creative period occurred in the 1980s. At that time, individuals had relatively ample time at their disposal. He picked up his camera, retreated to Huangshan Mountain, wandered the streets and alleys, and spent a full decade defining his own path. He created almost entirely based on his keen artistic intuition, free from the influence of prevailing photographic concepts and without deliberately imitating others' techniques. This allowed him to more authentically portray the primal state of social survival at the time. However, as time passed, this creative approach has gradually been diluted. Today, as the pace of life grows faster and the space for photographers to freely create diminishes, the overwhelming abundance of technology, equipment, financial resources, and information has made many photographers restless. In an era that increasingly emphasizes practicality, photography is becoming more and more dependent on commerce, and the trend of blindly chasing novelty and the unusual within the photographic community only highlights the steady mindset in Chen Haiwen's seemingly ordinary works.
Although Haiwen has also immersed himself in business, using his camera to the frontier of wealth, he has moved from an almost instinctual and intuitive focus on the survival of ordinary people into the vast ocean of market survival. He has found new habitats and growth points for life and art, bridging the gap between artistic creation and market demand. When many photographers lost their direction and meaning due to the impact of society and the times, Haiwen instead experienced a resurgence, with his creative passion stretching freely like a road.