Xu Zhen

徐震

Movement Field

source: cafa

Provocation has always been a main aspect in Xu Zhen’s creation, touching upon taboos, definitions and rules. His early work8848-1.86, fully reflects doubts about power and truth – this installation is a ‘troublemaker’, ironizing humankind’s illusory and blind pursuit for a certain ‘apogee’- it encompasses the current chaotic situation in politics, economy, culture and history generated by ambitions of hegemony, selfish desires. With provocation as a stimulus, Xu Zhen builds a systematized ‘destruction/reconstruction’ cycle. This logic reached its climax when in 2009he announced that ‘Xu Zhen’ was over, and began ‘MadeIn Company’. Under his direction, MadeIn creative team acted in a more radical way, at the edge of art creation, power and business. Operating under a public ‘undercover’ identity, ‘MadeIn’undertook all kind of experiences within this mechanism.

As Xu Zhen elaborated this art system, ‘Movement’ became a new keyword, it pointed out and aroused a reflection on the complexity of human collective consciousness and attitude. The series Movementism,created in 2012, was conceived by Xu Zhen as he subtly caught the fact that “people all have a certain desire of accomplishing a movement”.The newly created Movement Fieldthat will be presented this time, is an utopian space composed of multiplereal movement-relateditineraries.This Movement Field is a memorial, which questionspast and future commemorations; it constitutes a place for infinite spiritual quests. Thus, works from the series True Image exhibited within this Movement Fieldrepresents a form of media creation based on media diffusion. Among them, pictorial installations inspired by ‘faith’ and ‘symbols’, such as a lotus composed of gas stoves and huge rainbows Buddha,embodyXu Zhen’s comprehensionof faith and self-belief. ‘Ginseng’ images collected from the internet, probe Eastern and Western different cultural backgrounds and knowledge about a similar material, this work alludes to a certain upright tolerance within disorder and confusion.

These works by XuZhen, will all be displayed in MadeIn Company Spring 2013 New Works Exhibitionorganized by Long March Space. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience Xu Zhen’s Movementism. Xu Zhen considers that Human actions (and thoughts) that are stimulated by goalsconstitutea movement, heraises requestsonitsscale, adheres to this attitude, and determines a particular way of understanding. Through his signature provocation and doubt,  Xu Zhen audaciously reveals his attitude towards the world. 

MadeIn Company Spring 2013 New Works Exhibition will be held at Long March Space. On this occasion, MadeIn Company is proud to announce the launch of the brand ‘Xu Zhen’. Simultaneously,MadeIn will become a company that represents and creates art brands. In 2009, as MadeIn Company was established, Xu Zhen declared he won’t use his individual identity anymore. This return isn’t an individual artist’s comeback, but the creation of a new brand. MadeIn Company will dedicate its work in terms of art creation, production, promotion, and collectionto the brand ‘Xu Zhen’. Hence, Xu Zhen is experiencing a third identity phase: from an individual entity to MadeIn Company’s entrepreneur, to a brand introduced by MadeIn Company. The emergence of ‘Xu Zhen’ brand is a breakthrough in the openness and possibilities in contemporary art; ‘Xu Zhen’ brand development will become a new model in contemporary art.

Since 2002, Long March Space has collaborated with artist Xu Zhen, and since 2009, MadeIn Company. Long March Space is proud to continue the journey and represent the “Xu Zhen” brand.

Long March Space works with leading artists to produce exhibitions and projects that breakthrough conventional understanding of art and culture, the individual and society. The gallery acts as both an alternative and complement to the mainstream social and economic conditions and the art market in China.
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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. Born in 1977, Xu has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2014); the Minsheng Museum, Shanghai (2012); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2011); and S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2009); as well as major international group exhibitions such as 14 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); the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); Art Unlimited at Art Basel (2007); China Power Station: Part II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); and The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China at Tate Liverpool (2007). He was also included in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), and represented China at the 51st Venice Biennale, (2005). He lives and works in Shanghai.
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source: uccaorgcn

An irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen (b. 1977) is the key figure of the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1980. Including over 50 installation pieces, 10 videos, 40 painting and collage works, and several performances, together filling UCCA’s signature Great Hall, this exhibition spans Xu Zhen’s early works made in his own name beginning in the late 1990s, works produced under the “contemporary art creation company” MadeIn Company which he founded in 2009, as well as major new pieces produced specially for this exhibition under MadeIn Company’s newly launched brand “Xu Zhen.” Presented together, Xu Zhen’s oeuvre reflects the lingering concerns of an artist participating in the international art world while remaining deeply skeptical of it and its conventions, most immediately the label “Chinese contemporary art.” Xu Zhen’s artworks probe the various mediations that corrupt the viewer’s experience of an artwork, particularly in observing a culture that is not one’s own. The exhibition is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari and UCCA Chief Curator Paula Tsai.
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source: jamescohan

Shanghai-based Xu Zhen is an irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media. Incorporating painting, mechanical installation, video, photography and performance, often within a single piece, Xu satirizes and exposes cultural assumptions, wryly disarms political rhetoric, and generates some of the art world’s most vital contemporary discussion about brand expectations and conventions of creative production and authorship.