XU ZHEN

Venue: ShanghART main space & ShanghART H-Space, Building 16 & 18, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai

‘My work is to find a new angle of understanding these cultures. It happens when you have enough confident to look at these ready-made works as one of the human beings. What you need to do is to constantly breaking the stereotypes and achieve a new ego.’
–Xu Zhen

Xu Zhen: Blissful As Gods produced by MadeIn Company is opening on November 11th at ShangART Shanghai. This solo exhibition will bring Xu Zhen’s latest works including installation, sculpture and visual art.

Xu Zhen’s practice incorporates a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance, often within a single piece. He has strong thirst for knowledge and distinctive integration ability towards the extremely multifarious and interacted information from worldwide. Widely absorbing the knowledge, he creates multi-media and cross-platform works upon.

For example in Xu Zhen’s early video work Shouting (1998), a moving crowd faces away from the camera until, the artist startled by screams behind them and they spin around (a reaction that elicits laughs from whomever is behind the camera). This work marks Xu Zhen’s name as the youngest Chinese to participate in the Venice Biennale so far.

In 2007, Xu Zhen’s installation project ShangART SUPERMARKET (2007) created a full-scale 1:1 replica of a proto-typical Chinese convenient store at Art Basel Miami Beach. This store is filled with packages and wrappings containing, literally, nothing. The false appearance of the shop, or of the ghostly merchandise as such, trigger an extensive debate over the illusory booming of art market is about to burst.

Eternity is another important new collection created by Xu Zhen in 2014. It consists in sculptural compositions created from Western and Asian headless statues displayed in museums throughout the world. These originally beheaded works are grafted and assembled together. Which might be the most accurate expression resembled the cliche of enormous amount of Chinese art.

Along with its celestial nature, XU Zhen: Blissful as Gods will further challenge the concept of ‘recombination’, it will reconstruct commonly known traditional Buddhist statues, using materials beyond all expectations according to a hidden logic. A new visual perception will be born and quaintly coincide with the world around, thus initiating a dialogue with each other. This dialogue between one ideology and another, will involve culture, history, art, religion, tradition, political space... Through this re-composition, all the materials’ inherent tradition and meaning will be rejected, presenting an intense estrangement and irritation. All these works will be gathered in one exhibition space. Subversions of cultural clashes will create a great impact on viewers. The effrontery and provocation that emanate from MadeIn/Xu Zhen’s art creation as a response to reality will all contribute to the abrupt and chaotic atmosphere of this exhibition.