Vhils: Latency - Shanghai

Since his debuts in the early 2000s, Vhils has been scratching the surface of a long series of objects and city walls. The originality of his work was evident from the start: instead of adding anything to a medium, the artist would carve into it to reveal its deeper layers, likening the process to an "archaeology of the city". Remnants of time gone by, relics of a collective history, Vhils’ artworks bring to consciousness in a powerful way the many temporalities that surround us and make up our environment.

“What I love working with is textured layers that speak of how things change, grow and evolve over time. It is by working through these layers that I seek to bring to the surface something of the essence that has been trapped beneath them.”

- Vhils

Sculptor, urban artist, interdisciplinary artist... Among all the qualifiers that fit him, Vhils certainly deserves to be called a portraitist. His work is a vibrant homage to what national constitutions or political slogans emphatically call “the People”, the human factor at the core of any social and historical narrative. By portraying the anonymous, Vhils seeks to put Man back in the center, to reaffirm his importance in the face of economic rationales. A deeply humanistic vision where notions of identity, community and urban development never cease to overlap and to prompt new questions.