XU ZHEN® (徐震) is a Chinese conceptual artist and curator. Working across a variety of media, including installation, video, painting, and performance, he has established himself as an iconic figure in contemporary Chinese art.
Read MoreXu’s works combine a social critique of contemporary life with a dark sense of humour and an obvious, albeit ironic, disdain for the politics of art. His installations often take the form of elaborate, theatrical pranks. His ShanghART Supermarket, originally exhibited in 2007, replicates exactly an ordinary convenience store, though with empty products that are sold at the original price. Other, more recent works, have aimed to fuse elements of Chinese and Western cultures in a way that rejects typical perceptions of Chinese culture.
XU ZHEN® founded MadeIn Company, a collective contemporary art practice, in 2009. Xu has been producing works collaboratively since the collective’s inception, although several have been censored due to ‘inappropriate’ themes of violence and erotica. In 2014, Xu returned to his individual practice, though now as a ‘product’ of MadeIn Company, rather than its founder.
The artist’s recent solo exhibitions have included Movement Field at Long March Space, Beijing (2013); ShanghART Supermarket at ShanghART, Singapore (2014); Blissful As Gods at ShanghART H-Space, China (2014-2015); and Look Again at Pékin Fine Arts, Hong Kong (2015). Xu has exhibited at international institutions and biennales such as the Venice Biennale (both 2001 and 2005), the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Tate, Liverpool; and the Long Museum, Shanghai.
In 2004, Xu was awarded the prize for Best Artist at the China Contemporary Art Awards. He lives and works in Shanghai.
Since Beijing-based UCCA Center for Contemporary Art announced a new satellite museum in 2019, the opening of UCCA Edge in Shanghai has been hotly anticipated.
The exhibition is a who's who of the city's artists, with some surprising international inclusions.
With Art021 and West Bund Art & Design taking place in November, we recommend 17 shows to see in Shanghai this winter.
China's post-80s artists are no longer all that 'young', nor do they much need that moniker. With the oldest of that generation fast approaching 40, to call them young would be misleading given how ra
Iteration refers to the way of achieving a desired result through repeated feedback. The exhibited series shows how an artist, amidst increasing globalization and networking of art, can approach the f
Mention new media art, and the first things which might come to mind are a sense of ephemerality and insubstantiality – the evanescence of artworks which exist, in some sense, as particular arrangements of bits. Not so with The Dynamics, a largely new media-based group exhibition at Singapore’s ShanghART gallery, which places some...
In June, a new local policy banning private entities from renting state-owned property meant BANK was evicted from its previous gallery space – the Union Bank building near Shanghai’s Bund district that gave the gallery its name. Now BANK has finally announced a solo by Austin Lee as the inaugural show of its new venue in Xuhui...
Who are the people under 40 making waves in the art world? That was the question we asked ourselves in 2014, when we launched the first Apollo 40 Under 40. That year’s list, which focused on Europe, and the subsequent 40 Under 40 USA, weren’t meant as power lists but as surveys of talent: of young people who have firmly established...
