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23/5/2007

Chen Zhen

Kunsthalle Wien, Wien

The Body as Landscape

I don’t play with incomprehension: I try to create it.
Chen Zhen

In fact, I’m becoming a hybrid man, an amphibian, why not?
Chen Zhen

Curator: Gerald Matt

Chen Zhen was a boundary crosser, a “cultural homeless,” who created symbolical bridges between different realities. Having received great international acclaim, his work has long come to be a reference for a later generation of artists. Now, more than thirty years after Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong, a many-faced and dynamic art scene has established in China, which has also set out to roll up the international art market at a rapid pace. Chen’s career as an artist exemplarily stands for the beginning of this development which took place under the burning glass of enormous political and economic changes. Isolation, censorship, and constant repression by the Chinese Communist Party constituted a tenor according to which a political threat was suspected to linger behind every new artwork. Together with Huang Yongping and Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen counted among those outstanding artists of the Chinese avant-garde, who, disillusioned by post-Maoist reform policies, left China in the mid-1980s already. Chen went to Paris in 1986, where he developed his work as a transhistorical utopian projection which sought to create harmony by difference. Originally a painter, he soon turned to sculptural and installation works, using the human body, illness, and Chinese medical practices as metaphors to explore the complex and sometimes paradoxical interplay between the material and the spiritual, the communal and the individual, between inside and out. Chen saw himself as a mediator in an aesthetic-political interzone informed by Confucian and Maoist China, as well as by the central themes and artistic convulsions of Western modernity.

Jue Chang, Dancing Body - Drumming Mind (Last Song), 2000, is a monumental percussion instrument that is at the center of the homage to Chen Zhen in the Kunsthalle Wien. About one hundred chairs, stools, and beds covered with animal skins make the drumheads of the object which gains its full significance only by interaction with the audience. Jue Chang unfolds a social dynamics which, in an infinitely subtle network of (national, religious, political, social, ideological, and cultural) relationships, provides the space for a complex and multicultural reality. At a time when the words globalization and multiculturalism were not part of the lingua franca prevailing in the discourses dedicated to an explanation of the world, Chen Zhen evolved ethical and aesthetic maxims which, with compelling farsightedness, brought the critique of globalization, interculturalism, and ethnicity into international circulation.

Chinese thought models presumed to have long fallen into oblivion were reinterpreted by him and related to contemporary socio-cultural value systems. For his works Purification Room, L’Oubli/Le Souvenir and No Way to Sky, No Door to Earth, he fell back on a very small number of elementary materials which he used and combined in different ways so as to occasion ever-new moments of reflection. Using earth, water, and fire, used-up and now functionless objects were reintegrated in meaningful perceptual contexts. It was less the archiving of Chinese tradition but rather the effort of locating one’s own identity within a field of conflicting cultural models which posed a challenge to Chen. The exile sharpened his awareness of the subtle transitions and differences, shifts and movements permanently resulting from today’s cultural and civilizational processes. The fragile balance of The Voice of Migrators - an oversized textile ball from which the multilingual murmur of a telephone answering machine is heard - illustrates a vision which does not pinpoint the individual on one ethnic position but gently integrates individual cultural identity into the framework of the totality of existence.

Chen’s intellectual and artistic approach breathes great poetic and conceptual power and a fundamentally individual, independent attitude - every work being a reflection of his biography, a site of analogy where the individual, social, cultural and material bodies are fused in one organic landscape. Experiencing the body as landscape calls for a special sensitivity for processes, forms, and materials. Accordingly, the exhibition follows neither a chronological nor thematic order but, in the first place, seeks a dialogue with its spatial environment. Informed by the transitory character of the works exhibited, the interplay of closeness and distance starts a dialogue which subtly expands and modifies the metaphorical statements made by the individual pieces.

Chen Zhen died of leukemia in December 2000: the understanding of his disease as an ineluctable part of his being influenced all his considerations as an artist. His perhaps most important “project” was his ambition to heal himself: “becoming a doctor” is to be understood both literally and as part of his artistic intentions. All his approaches, whether his specific handling of objects, his attitude towards migration and exile, and his far-reaching visions of intercultural dialogue, clearly document the unspeakable that translated spirituality and healing power into the materiality of sculptures.
The Kunsthalle Wien shows the first retrospective encompassing all important periods of the artist’s work in Austria: drawings, photographic collages, sculptures, and installations, including models and sketches of his unrealized projects, which have never been presented to date. The approximately forty works on show dating from between 1989 and 2000 will continue the dialogue interrupted by Chen Zhen’s untimely death.

The homage to Chen Zhen centers around Jue Chang, Dancing Body – Drumming Mind (Last Song) (2000), a monumental percussion instrument: about a hundred chairs, stools, and beds fitted with animal hides constitute an enormous playing surface challenging visitors to act. This work of communication and cultural confrontation unfolds the artist’s determined utopia of multicultural dialogue.
Chen Zhen (1955–2000) numbers among the most prominent Chinese avant-garde artists, who, disillusioned by post-Maoist reform politics, left China in the mid-eighties. In 1986, he emigrated to Paris where his concept of “open sculpture” received international acclaim.
Chen’s installations are poetical landscapes, unusual material alliances, hybrids that open up passages and new connecting paths between Far Eastern traditions and Western avant-garde movements. He interweaves aspects of his self-chosen exile, his disease, and traditional Chinese medicine to produce metaphorical objects interpreting and resurveying the societal body.
Kunsthalle Wien now shows the first retrospective encompassing all important periods of the artist’s work in Austria, including models and sketches of his unrealized projects, which have never been presented to date. The drawings, photographic works, sculptures, and installations dating from between 1989 and 2000 continue the dialogue between the cultures interrupted by Chen’s untimely death.

Exhibition catalogue | Publication of Chen Zhen’s unrealized projects
Chen Zhen - The Body as Landscape. Edited by Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt. Preface by Gerald Matt, texts by Kenneth Lum, Maïté Vissault, Wang Min´An. English, 96 pages, 48 illustrations, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg.

Chen Zhen. 1991-2000 unrealized. Edited by Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald Matt. Preface by Gerald Matt, introduction by Gerald Matt and Ilse Lafer. English, 224 pages, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg.
Both publications will be available for 29 euros in the Kunsthalle Wien.

Information and photographs: Katharina Murschetz, KUNSTHALLE wien, office: Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Vienna
Telephone: +43-1-521 89-1221, fax: +43-1-521 89-1217, e-mail: presse@kunsthallewien.at

Roundtable 4 and 18 June, 2007
Political and philosophical talks on modern China: with Richard Trappl (sinologist, University
of Vienna), Thomas Seiffert (journalist, Die Presse), Harro von Senger (sinologist) a.o.

Press preview: Thursday, 24 May 2007, 10 a.m.
Opening: Thursday, 24 May 2007, 7 p.m.

Kunsthalle Wien, hall 1,
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Daily 10 a.m. - 7 p.m., Thur 10 a.m. - 10 p.m.

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