徐震

Long Museum West Bund

source: thelongmuseumorg

On the occasion of the first anniversary of its inauguration, the Long Museum (West Bund Branch) will host the grand opening of Xu Zhen Solo Exhibition on March 28, 2015. Xu Zhen is an iconic, leading figure within the realm of contemporary Chinese art, and moreover he is the most sought-after international contemporary artist currently. Surveying art ancient and new, the artist marshals Chinese and Western cultures and fuses the quintessence of both. Through his meticulous treatment and distinctive integration of global knowledge and information, he generates an infinite degree of creativity.

Xu Zhen (born in 1977 in Shanghai, China) engages in an artistic practice that takes in numerous forms of mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance, among others. Within the 30 000-odd sqm space of the Long Museum (West Bund Branch), this exhibition will showcase over a hundred works, which include not only his earlier representative individual works from the late-1990s but also a series of new works produced after Xu Zhen’s MadeIn Company launched the “Xu Zhen” brand in 2013. Highlights include European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture, the new works The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian and Northern Qi Standing Buddha, Amazon and Barbarian from the Eternityseries, as well as the series MadeIn Curved Vase, Metal Languageand Corporate.

The exhibition’s advertising slogan—“Witness the Creation of History”—brings to light the sense in which this exhibition echoes history and cultural innovation. At the same time, this equally signals a breakthrough and a leap forward in the artist’s career. It may appear as a matter of course that history is considered a symbol of the past, an exemplar of culture, and a cipher of tradition, and yet Xu Zhen continually breaks down this predetermined mode of thought, deploying everything from within the farrago of global culture. He inherits history and is broadly nourished by tradition; taking up a stance replete with cultural self-confidence and a high degree of cultural reflexivity, he lives for the contemporary.

With his characteristic humor, Xu Zhen intervenes in all manners of subject matter concerning global culture. With a taut expressiveness, he ingeniously integrates a Western spirit with Eastern culture—a new culture which transcends traditional schemas is hereby born. The all-new creation European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography, the work deals with both the sense of form and spirituality, thereby manifesting a vigorous vitality which dumbfounds the audience’s visual perception. Eternity grafts the dignified and serene Buddhist statues of the East together with elegant and exquisite Greek statues, thus cutting across vast expanses of space and time; its references to an awe-inspiring scale of art history points to the capaciousness of Eastern wisdom. Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian joins two Western sculptural works; its absurd and yet stunning visual effect perfectly showcases the balance of force and belief. MadeIn Curved Vaseturns the necks of ancient Chinese classics of ceramics by 90 degrees and accomplishes the greatest act in ceramic history. Physique of Consciousness Museum, by incorporating social, religious, and traditional forms as elements, invents a calisthenics for the mind and spirit—a first in the world. Metal Language collects words frompolitical caricatures and spells out independent and yet vivid phrases with metal chains, thereby fully developing the tactility of thought. In the newly launched Black Light series of Under Heaven, meanwhile, a sweeping and cavernous forest of black “cream” exudes an intense air of mystery, spouting forth a fearless and dauntless force.

The exhibition will furthermore present a series of Xu Zhen’s earlier representative individual works. These include the video Shouting, created in 1998, where on the crowded streets of Shanghai, Xu Zhen suddenly bursts out screaming—the fright and bewilderment in the crowd’s faces, turned backwards, were fully captured. In Rainbow, a man’s back is beaten until it burns red, and yet the hand doing the beating is abstracted; an intuitive sense of the body and of life is hence clearly seen. This work, moreover, made him the youngest Chinese artist ever to have participated in the main thematic exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The installation ShanghART Supermarket recreates a convenience store on-site: the shelves are crammed full of empty products, while the items, sold at their ordinarily marked prices, only have the external shells of their packaging. The emptiness and the lack of content hit the nail on the head—the dialectical relationship between art and commodity is challenged anew.

In the globalized post-Internet contemporary, Xu Zhen has continually pioneered forms of artistic creation. As an artist, he also tackles the roles of the curator, entrepreneur, and gallerist. Amid these interchanging identities, he nevertheless ensures that the creation maintains a high degree of consistency and leads MadeIn Company to expand comprehensively in cultural fields—developing curatorial production, research and publications, from galleries to limited-edition artworks. By initiating each of these, he practices what he preaches: the core concept of “producing creativity”. The exhibition will coincide with the launch of an exhibition catalogue that brings independent product catalogues together into a box set, perfectly forging the brand-new artistic aesthetics of the MadeIn Company product catalogue.
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source: fondationlouisvuittonfr

Après une formation au Shanghai Arts & Crafts Institute, il réalise à partir de la fin des années 1990 des vidéos performatives et des installations où il exerce son ironie sur les produits de la société de consommation et du monde de l’art. Ainsi, dans Shouting (1998), montre une foule de dos se retourner mécaniquement à l’appel de cris lancés par l’artiste. ShangART Supermarket (2007) est la reproduction d’un magasin chinois rempli de paquets d’emballages vidés de leurs contenus. Parallèlement à ses activités artistiques, Xu Zhen fonde en 1998 BizArt, premier centre d’art non-lucratif à Shanghai, et contribue au lancement de Art-Ba-Ba, un forum en ligne sur l’art contemporain chinois. En 2009, Xu Zhen dissout sa propre identité artistique en créant MadeIn Company, une entreprise destinée à la production et à la recherche artistiques, mais aussi à l’organisation d’expositions et à la publication de catalogues, possédant également un site Internet et une galerie. Faisant référence au « made in China », mais également à l’expression chinoise : « société sans frontières », cette compagnie interroge les limites de l’art et de la marchandise, les codes du marché de l’art et de l’unicité de l’« œuvre », assimilant ses réalisations à des « produits », le nom de Xu Zhen lui-même devenant une marque.aaaorghk

Xu Zhen is one of the most interesting and promising artists working in China today. An irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen is a key figure in the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1980.
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source: randian-online

徐震 (1977年生于中国上海) 的艺术实践涉及众多媒介，包括绘画、雕塑、机械装置、录影、摄影和行为等，且经常糅杂于一件作品中。“徐震：没顶公司出品”在UCCA大展厅呈现，包括逾50件装置、10件录影、40件绘画、拼贴和多件行为作品，展览脉络十分清晰：从徐震1990年代末的早期个人创作，到2009年创立没顶公司之后的集体身份创作，再到2013年没顶公司推出品牌“徐震”并发布一系列重要新作。

展览标题“徐震：没顶公司出品”揭示了长期以来徐震的个人实践和他所根植的上海当代艺术圈之间的关系。自2009年开始，徐震将个人的艺术创作绑定在“生产当代艺术”的没顶公司名下，作为公司老板继续策划专案、制造作品并以集体的名义参加展览。没顶公司体现了徐震的独一无二之处：将艺术实践、策划和推广融于一身，综合构造了其多元化的艺术生涯和在上海艺术领域的特殊地位。这种消解自我角色的创作方式是对当代艺术体系中的身份政治的反叛，自1997年徐震开始艺术创作至今，他的作品一直是集体力量的产物。

馆长田霏宇认为，“自新世纪之初，徐震在怀疑、行动、思考和不断实践中形成独特的体系，造就了中国当代艺术迄今最具说服力和自省精神的一系列作品。我们期待向更多尚未熟知这位杰出艺术家的观众们介绍和展示他的重要创作。”

徐震以其惯有的嘲讽姿态介入庞杂多变的论题，近似于伊夫•克莱因式的恶作剧：从《看见自己的眼睛：中东当代艺术展》(一个充斥着虚构的中东艺术家作品的“群展”) 中的跨文化政治和国际视角，到《饥饿的苏丹》(在展厅内原样重现了凯文•卡特摄于1994年的同名代表作) 中的关于种族和苦难的窥私癖与道德焦虑，再到《8848-1.86》(徐震“锯掉”了等同自己身高的珠穆朗玛峰顶，并运到美术馆参加展览) 对当代艺术系统的游戏规则的调侃。综合来看，徐震的艺术实践反映了艺术家个体对于国际当代艺术系统和游戏规则的持续关注及深刻质疑，而“中国当代艺术”这一标签是最直接的例证。徐震反复地探测那些侵蚀观者的视觉经验的仲介物，尤其当物件是异质文化时所产生的转译问题。

“徐震：没顶公司出品”将呈现他的一系列代表作品，包括创作于1998年的录影《喊》，徐震在拥挤的城市街头突发性地喊叫，只是为了捕捉数百名路人在瞬间的惊望回头和各种反应，这件作品使他成为迄今为止参加威尼斯双年展主题展的最年轻的中国艺术家。2007年的装置《香格纳超市》则按照原比例在迈阿密巴塞尔艺术博览会的现场复制了一个上海便利商店，货架上摆满了被抽空的包装、标价售卖的只是徒有其表的外壳，在艺术市场泡沫即将破灭的当时引发了大规模的争辩。在2013的新作《意识形状博物馆》中，徐震以一系列社会、宗教和政治的规准去陈列考古学及人类学文物——实际上只是摆放同样的照片——对地点或时间的起源则毫无尊重。
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source: jamescohan

Xu Zhen is a conceptual artist whose work often takes the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions that confront sociopolitical taboos in contemporary China and freely manipulate western expectations of Chinese art and commerce.

In 2009 Xu Zhen subsumed his individual artistic identity and transformed into MadeIn – an “art creation company.” Subsequently in 2013, MadeIn launched a brand – Xu Zhen, redundantly making Xu a product of his own corporation.

Born in 1977, Xu Zhen has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2015); Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2014); the Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China (2012); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2011); and S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2009); as well as major international group exhibitions such as Journey Beyond the Arrow, Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2019); Physique of Consciousness, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, United Kingdom (2018); Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2017); 20th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2016); Chinese artists at a time of Turbulence and Transformation, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016); Contemporary Art from China, Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, Qatar (2016); New Collection, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); 15 Rooms, co-curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Art Basel (2014); the 12th Biennale de Lyon (2013); Art of Change, Hayward Gallery, UK (2012); Performa07, New York (2007) and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007). He was also included in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Modern Art Musuem of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. He lives and works in Shanghai.
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source: obviousmagorg

O artista comptemporâneo Xu Zhen gosta de provocar; seus trabalhos têm especial interesse no conflito, no incômodo e na mais pura ironia nonsense, frívola e megalomaníaca. Com 30 anos, o proeminente artista de Shangai executa videos-instalações onde contempla a atualidade e a tecnologia num viés performático reunindo dezenas de pessoas para que integrem o conceito de “corpo” que propõe em seus curta metragens e fotografias.