ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Xu Zhen®
XU ZHEN®’s provocative aesthetics relies on both conceptual and pop strategies. He first undertook behavioral and cultural experiments as an autonomous artist via controversial performances and videos. Ironically mirroring post-Mao China’s journey into consumerism, he has since transformed himself into a brand with the creation in 2009 of his art corporation MadeIn Company.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Perrotin Gallery Archive
XU ZHEN®’s solo exhibition “The Glorious” feature three of the artist’s signature work series: “Under Heaven”, “Eternity” and “Evolution”, showcasing a variety of installations, paintings, and sculptures. Since the founding of MadeIn Company in 2009, XU ZHEN® has produced works as a brand, utilizing modern production mechanisms to tackle the current plight of art amidst globalization and capitalization. By juxtaposing classical elements of civilization throughout human history and making them collide, the artist resuscitates visual experience in everyday life and prevalent symbols of art history, enabling spectators to interpret a host of issues: the value of art, clashes of culture, geopolitics, in a different light. The skepticism and ideological trends of post-modernity have long been at the very root of XU ZHEN®’s creative practice. Cultural appropriation and shifting iconographies are recurrent in his oeuvre. With this exhibition the artist provides spectators with various inroads into interpreting our present-day culture and social plight. “Under Heaven-Gold” is a brand-new revamp of an existing series, “Under Heaven”, in which bright-colored pigments are densely and profusely applied onto the canvas using cream piping bags, resulting in baroque-style squiggles and swirls that evoke a carnivalesque revelry in a realm under heaven conjured by the artist. XU ZHEN® consistently employs readily digestible artistic experiences, which take on a satirical function as metaphors for modern society’s excessive consumerism and explore the limits of commodifying art. Revealed in other chromatic installments of the “Under Heaven” series is the collusion between sensualism and commercialization. This “Gold” series, despite its use of the most opulent color known to man, irradiates a dignified and profound beauty. The series “Eternity” takes inspiration from the headless statues found in China and the West. By reproducing and grafting these statues together, the artist provides a new civilizational paradigm for the relationship between violence and the sublime, confrontation and coexistence, and dilapidation and imperishability. The juxtaposition of both regional statues not only alludes to art history and its manmade nomenclature, but also mankind’s colonial past, and within the work, irreconcilable differences appear to gradually crumble and dissipate. The “Evolution” series develops out of the “Eternity” series, and although they stem from different spatio-temporal contexts, both exhibit cultural disparity against a global backdrop. “Evolution” further extends its creative tentacles to primitive art situated on the threshold of mainstream culture, transforming African masks and Dunhuang frescoes into a marvelous blend of cartoon and traditional art.
Info: Perrotin Gallery, 50 Connaught Road Central, 17th Floor, Hong Kong, Duration: 25/3-11/5/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
