The subject of this portrait is Anni Albers (1899-1994), who enrolled at the Bauhaus hoping to study painting. However, like many other female students, she was instead directed to the weaving workshop. Despite this inauspicious beginning, she would gradually adopt textiles as her primary artistic medium. Expanding the boundaries of textile art, Albers experimented with new materials, proposed avant-garde designs, and situated her work within the context of contemporary architecture.

Chen Ke is particularly interested in impact Paul Klee had on Albers during his tenure at the Bauhaus, as well as her creative and personal relationship with her husband, abstract painter Josef Albers. The connections between modern weaving and abstract painting—underscored by the Alberses’ intertwined practices—not only drew Chen Ke towards re-examining this historical moment, but also inspired her to expand her own visual language. In this piece, she treats color and line as elements to be woven together, layering blocks of colorful to build up both Anni Albers’ likeness and the overall texture that fills the picture plane. Within the painting, Albers seems to merge into the abstracted geometric pattern that fills the background.

Since launching her “Bauhaus Gal” series in 2020, Chen Ke has already presented two exhibitions exploring the legacy of the Bauhaus from different angles. In “Bauhaus Unknown,” her third exhibition in this sequence, was conceived with the intention of engaging with the historical architecture that houses UCCA and the rest of 798 Art District. Built as a Bauhaus-style factory complex, 798 is today a key node for Chinese contemporary art. Within this setting that encapsulates the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based one, Chen Ke poses a question: might the daily practice of an artist also be considered productive labor? After all, the distinction between artist and artisan can be a subtle one, and the Bauhaus itself sought to blend together art, industry, and craft.

This exhibition focuses on the Bauhaus weaving workshop, where the majority of the institution’s female students were enrolled. Despite gender norms of the time positioning the workshop as peripheral, it achieved significant commercial success, providing a pillar of financial support for the Bauhaus. Prominent textile artists Anni Albers and Gunta Stötzl also trained and taught there. Through their work, they demonstrated that weaving was not simply a craft, but a veritable artistic medium compatible with modern creative approaches.

Here, Chen Ke weaves together scenes of factories past and present, real and imagined. These buildings seem to gradually fade into abstract fragments of shifting colors, lines, and planes.

This large-scale felt mural is a new site-specific work. As Chen Ke developed the piece for UCCA, she attempted to formulate a painterly language inspired by abstract woven patterns, seeking to capture the rich textures, vibrant colors, and distinctly modernist aesthetic of textiles produced by the Bauhaus weaving workshop. However, she eventually settled on colored felt—an industrial, readymade material—as the ideal medium for this work, in which she uses a collage-like approach to deconstruct and reinterpret historical images.

Unknown is based on two archival photographs. One is a group photograph of thirteen celebrated Bauhaus “masters” (professors). They include school’s founder Walter Gropius and prominent artists Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others—all of them men, with the exception of Gunta Stölzl. The other photograph shows a Bauhaus weaving class. While Stölzl and Anni Albers can be recognized, the identities of the other women captured in the image are unknown.

The work also pays tribute to the color theory proposed by Josef and Anni Albers, which posits that the relationship between colors and space can impact perception. As per the theory, one can only grasp the essence of color through repeated comparative experiments, observing how hues appear to change based on their neighbors. With this in mind, Chen Ke first made small preparatory sketches in watercolor, then collaged color paper to map out the composition, and finally assembled the felt pieces in the gallery. The process of constant comparison and adjustment allowed her to engage in a dialogue with the space, using color itself to craft a rhythm-filled geometric composition that hints at narrative.

In these works on paper Chen Ke adopts an improvisational approach, contrasting the carefully considered compositions and color palettes of her oil paintings. Lines, colors, and geometric shapes freely come together, like excerpts from a visual diary or abstract depictions of subconscious thought. Chen Ke completed many of these pieces in the early morning, a transitional moment that she feels infuses them with a deeper level of introspection and intuition.

At first glance, Chen Ke’s works on paper seem to differ a great deal from the oil paintings featured in this exhibition. In fact, these works were created over the same period of time, and share much in terms of theme, structure, and use of color. Though more spontaneous than her oil paintings, these works on paper also see the artist exploring the commonalities between woven textures and elements of abstract painting. Chen Ke will often start her day by making a few small pieces on paper as a kind of relaxed “morning exercise,” then move on to painting on canvas. Presented alongside her oil paintings, they help offer a more holistic view of her creative process.

This work was completed not long after Chen Ke began researching the Bauhaus weaving workshop. The figure in the painting is almost hidden by the warp and weft of the loom, their face blurred, their identity impossible to discern—reflecting how many female artists have remained “unknown” within histories of the Bauhaus. Attracted to the school by its apparent dedication to gender equality and artistic freedom, once they arrived women were directed towards the supposedly more “feminine” weaving workshop. Furthermore, their contributions often went unrecorded. However, the predominately female weaving workshop would become one of the most commercially successful and creatively dynamic departments at the Bauhaus. The women behind the looms explored textiles as both artistic media and functional material, designing commercially viable patterns while also experimenting with new techniques and fibers.

As Chen Ke continued with her research, these women would gradually move towards the foreground of her canvases, appearing as the subjects of a number of portraits in this gallery.

In these pieces, Chen Ke layers the image of a lighthouse on top of brightly lit weaving workshops. Overlapping blocks and strips of color create a strong sense of rhythm, and the rays of light emitted by the lighthouses recall threads on a spinning machine, forming distinctly Futurist tableaux. Located next to these paintings is a piece from 2015, in which a distant lighthouse sends a hopeful beam of light across a vast sea. The reappearance of the lighthouse, in the earlier work a reference to Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, forms a connection spanning a decade of Chen Ke’s practice. The motif not only speaks to how she has continued to explore the circumstances of women across different eras, but also how the artist’s perception of herself has developed and changed over time.

Chen Ke created collage “drafts” while preparing each of the oil paintings featured in “Bauhaus Unknown,” as well as the exhibition’s site-specific mural. Adding this stage to her creative process helped her work out compositions and refine her thinking. Though this was Chen Ke’s first time using collage as a drafting technique, she began making work in the medium a few years earlier: she crafted this group of collages on paper in 2022. Painting scraps of paper different colors, she then sketched out simple forms and stuck them on top of monochrome backgrounds, creating compositions out of little more than geometric blocks. With their lighthearted colors and straightforward shapes, these pieces are like freehand drawings from within a dream.

In this series, Chen Ke freely and spontaneously experiments with abstraction. Her explorations pay tribute to two key figures in early twentieth-century European art: Paul Klee and Sonia Delaunay. Klee taught a design theory course in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, and had a profound impact on Anni Albers through both his conceptual thinking and painting style. Though Delaunay was not directly connected with the Bauhaus, her practice in many ways paralleled the school’s values—though best known for her colorful geometric abstractions, she also worked in graphic design, textiles, jewelry, and furniture, blurring the boundaries between disciplines.

This piece is based on the same archival photograph of Marianne Brandt as Marianne and Lilies No. 1, found at the exhibition entrance. In Marianne and Lilies No. 2, which was completed more recently, the textile-inspired texture is softer, the pointillist color blocks smoother and more dispersed. Comparing the two paintings, one can get a sense of how Chen Ke’s “Bauhaus Gal” series continues to evolve.