CHEN ZUO

The exhibition begins with a portrait of a huddled drunkard, alternating between drunkenness and sobriety in urban life, a half-asleep, half-awake cycle that echoes his embodied environment and his witness to the progress of urbanisation. At the same time, contrary to the specific, material scenarios constructed by the modern city, most of the figures in Chen Zuo’s paintings are outside of the concrete scenarios. For example, the works Naughty Dog 2023, 2019 - 2023 (oil on canvas, 118 x 75 cm (painting), 121 x 78 cm (framed)) and Octopus GuaJia, 2023–2024 (oil on canvas, 135 x 100 cm (painting), 138 x 103 cm (framed)) are set in a suspended context, and the environments depicted in these two works range from the countryside with its gardening setting, to a part of the town illuminated by the cold light of the sky in the snowy winter night. The specific scenes Chen Zuo omits from his paintings can be regarded as a kind of bridging of the urban-rural dichotomy, with the village in the city as the result of the convergence of the two, which is also representative of the suburban areas of Beijing where he has lived for a long time.

In his works, even in bright daylight scenes, there are still a lot of dark tones, and through layers of brushstrokes and colour blocks, he builds up a depressing but full of vitality atmosphere. In contrast to the brightness, there are those lonely backs outlined in the afterglow of neon lights. The movements of the characters and animals in the paintings are stiff and their eyes are confused, whether they are ordinary people busily shuttling through the urban villages or vagabonds on the edge of the city, they all present a kind of wavering situation with no one to rely on amidst the ever-changing social process, creating an abrupt tension with the hustle and bustle of the city.

In Chen Zuo’s paintings, bright, emotionally charged scenes are often in dark tones, while on the contrary, they present more out-of-the-box colours, which contribute to the dramatic tension in his works far more than the contrast between light and shadow. Colour becomes an extension of emotion, and the metaphors brought about by the bold and rhythmic use of colour, along with the outlining of the artist community around him in his works, are in fact the result of an internal view of a larger social and structural situation. Just like the violent pursuit of self-awakening represented by ‘Burning’, the colours of brown-red, ultramarine-violet, nickel-yellow, and chrome-green are full of conflicts and oppositions, and they also build up the constancy of viewing. Through the brushstrokes and texture, as well as the hidden structure of the composition, he reveals his understanding of the individual in the modern society—a world full of opportunities and contradictions at the same time.