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Project Name: Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production

Posted in: Mixed media

Artist: Xu Zhen - MadeIn Company

press release: UCCA  is proud to announce a major mid-career survey of mercurial Chinese artist  Xu Zhen  (b. 1977, Shanghai), 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. The exhibition is curated by UCCA Director  Philip Tinari  and UCCA Chief Curator  Paula Tsai .

Xu Zhen, Eternity, 2013 3.5x13x1,5 m Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of UCCA.

Xu Zhen, In Just a blink of an Eye, 2005 Performance

Xu Zhen, 8848-1.86, 2005 Mixed media installation, photographs, video Rock climbing equipment, refrigerating box, tents, etc Dimensions variable Photo © Xu Zhen. Xu Zhen ’s practice incorporates a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, mechanical installation, video, photography, and performance, often within a single piece. '' Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production ''  comprises a similarly diverse set of works, with over 50 installation pieces, 10 videos, 40 painting and collage works, and several performances, filling UCCA’s signature Great Hall . The exhibition spans  Zhen ’s early works made in his own name beginning in 1997, works made under the moniker MadeIn Company between 2009 and 2013, as well as significant new pieces produced specially for this exhibition under MadeIn Company ’s ''Xu Zhen'' brand.

MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness Museum, 2012 Documents, installation, performance Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art The title '' Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production '' acknowledges the longstanding relationship between the artist’s individual practice and his sprawling involvement with the Shanghai contemporary art scene. In 2009, Xu Zhen dissolved his art practice into the “contemporary art creation company” MadeIn Company. Acting as the group’s CEO, Xu Zhen continues to undertake creative projects, artworks, and exhibitions under this revised mantle. MadeIn encapsulates Xu Zhen’s unique conflation of art practice, curatorial work, and art promotion that has defined his multifarious career in the Shanghai art scene. The artist’s withdrawal from his own name marks a rejection of the persona-driven contemporary art world while acknowledging that, since he first began working with art in 1997, Xu Zhen’s artwork has always been a collaborative effort. ''Since the early 2000s, Xu Zhen, with his unique combination of skepticism and action, contemplation and involvement, has produced some of the most compelling and self-knowing art contemporary China has ever seen. We look forward to presenting his considerable output to audiences who might not yet be familiar with the arc of his career.'' Philip Tinari , UCCA Director.

Xu Zhen, Eternity, 2013 3.5x13x1,5 m Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of UCCA.

Xu Zhen, Eternity, 2013 (detail) 3.5x13x1,5 m Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of UCCA.

MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness Museum, 2013 Installation Dimensions Variable Photo credit: MadeIn Company & Biennale de Lyon 2013, © Blaise Adilon.

MadeIn Company, Physique of Consciousness Museum, 2012 Documents, installation, performance Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art A prankster provocateur in the vein of Yves Klein, Xu Zhen engages a variety issues with his characteristic wryness, from the politics of intercultural and international viewing in  Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Middle East Contemporary Art  (a ''group show'' of works by fictional Middle Eastern artists), to voyeurism and ethical anxiety in depictions of race and suffering in  The Starving of Sudan  (an in-gallery tableau recreating Kevin Carter’s iconic 1994 photograph of a starving infant), to satire of de rigeur contemporary art practices in  8848-1.86  (wherein the artist ''removes'' a chunk of Mount Everest equivalent to his own height from the summit and brings it back for display in the museum).  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 .  '' Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production ''  includes a number of  Xu Zhen ’s landmark works. His 1998 videoShouting, in which the artist lets out pained shouts on crowded city streets, only to capture the sequential shock and dismissal of hundreds of passers-by, made him the youngest Chinese artist to date to be included in the Venice Biennale. His 2007 installation Shanghart Supermarket, which takes the shape of a Shanghai convenience store fully stocked with packaging that has been emptied of content, sold for the price of the putative objects, was widely debated when it debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach at the height of the last art-market bubble. In Physique of Consciousness Museum, Xu Zhen uses various social, religious, and political criteria to array archaeological and ethnographic artifacts—actually just mounted photographs of the same—without respect to place or time of origin.

Xu Zhen, ShanghART (2007) Installation Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art In a major new commission for the lobby, Xu Zhen literally and winkingly juxtaposes East and West - that operative cliché of so much art in China - by mounting headless replicas of key Hellenistic and Buddhist sculptures neck to neck. The UCCA exhibition is realized in collaboration with MadeIn Company. It is accompanied by an eponymous catalogue which will mark the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, with essays by Philip Tinari and Lu Mingjun. The exhibition will coincide with The Armory Show 2014 (March 5-9), for which Xu Zhen has been appointed the Commissioned Artist as part of the ''Armory Focus: China'' section which Tinari has curated. '' Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production '' is generously sponsored by the following individuals and institutions: Lin Moru, Qiao Zhibing, Shen Qibin, Zhang Wei, White Rabbit Collection, CP Denmark, ShanghART Gallery, and Long March Space.

Xu Zhen, Under Heaven - 1802F10138 (detail), 2012 Oil on canvas, aluminium 80x100x10 cm Produced by MadeIn Company

Xu Zhen, New (2014) and Calm (2009) Installation Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

Xu Zhen, MadeIn Curver Vase-Famille-rose Olive Vase with Bat and Peach Design Yongzheng Period Qing Dynasty, 2013 Installation Porcelain 17x17x40 cm Produced by MadeIn Company

Physique Of Consciousness, 2011 Performance, video

Portait of Xu Zhen at UCCA Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

Xu Zhen, The Starving Sudan, 2008 Installation, performance, photography

Xu Zhen, The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, 2010. Installation 400x537x20 cm Produced by MadeIn Company Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art