April 8, 2012 |
The impish conceptualist’s knowing in jokes, realised through sculptures, installations and videos, take aim at stereotypes, politics and the pervasive influence of filthy lucre. Consider ShanghART Supermarket, a replica of a convenience store, with shelves lined with empty packaging, which Xu Zhen first installed at the Shanghai Art Fair – a direct hit at the difficult convergence of art and the market.
Perhaps one of his most toothsome satires, though, is Lonely Miracle: Middle East Contemporary Art, the New York show he curated under his moniker MadeIn (which not only refers to the ubiquitous country-of-origin label we find on imported goods, but means “organisation” in Chinese). Though seemingly a group show of Middle Eastern artists, all the works were, in fact, conceived by Zhen. From the way the art on show played up to the tired cultural clichés seemingly demanded by Western art collectors eager to snap up the next exotic trend, it could easily have been for real, however. “Things I see every morning when I wake up and think of every night before I sleep”, a collection of tokenistic Middle Eastern flotsam, including camel figurines and urns, snarled up in a giant ball of razor wire, is a case in point.
Zhen is particularly hot on the way the media influences how we think about things and is something of an arch media manipulator himself. For the brilliant 8848-1.86 he created a spoof documentary where he and his team were shown doing nothing less than sawing off the top of Mount Everest. The tip of the castrated mountain was supposed to be hidden in a refrigerator displayed alongside the film. As luck would have it, when this project premiered at the Yokohama Triennial in 2005, the waters were muddied even further when a Chinese news programme announced that Everest had shrunk by four metres.
by Skye Sherwin
