Artist of the day: Artist of the day, April 1, 2020: Xu Zhen, a Chinese Sculptor, multimedia artist (#957)

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Artist of the day, April 1, 2020: Xu Zhen, a Chinese Sculptor, multimedia artist (#957)

Xu Zhen (1977) is a multimedia artist living and working in Shanghai, China. He is a leading figure among the young generation of Chinese artists. His extensive body of work, which includes photography, installation art, and video, entails theatrical humor and social critique. His projects are informed by performance and conceptual art. Xu’s work focuses on human sensitivity and dramatizes the humdrum of urban living.

Xu Zhen’s earlier representative individual works include the video Rainbow (1998), where a man’s back is beaten until it burns red, yet the hand doing the beating is abstracted. This work made him the youngest Chinese artist to have participated in the main thematic exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

His recent pieces survey ancient and new art while fusing Chinese and Western cultures into monumental installations or into new art forms. European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture (2014) assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography.

Xu Zhen’s curatorial experiments and engagement with an alternative art space BizArt (closed in 2010) complement and extend practice. Aside from being an artist, Xu Zhen organizes various art activities and co-curates with other artists. Major exhibitions in Shanghai

Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally at museums and biennales. He won the prize for ‘Best Artist’ at the China Contemporary Art Award in 2004 and ‘Best Artist of the Year’ at the AAC Award in 2014. His work has been collected by many institutions and private collections worldwide including the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Daimler Collection (Berlin, Germany), The White Rabbit Collection (Chippendale, Australia), the Rubell Famil Collection, (Miami, USA), the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (Lyon, France), the K11 (Shanghai) Collection, among others.

In 2009, Xu Zhen founded ‘MadeIn Company,’ a contemporary art creation corporate that plays off of the phrase "Made in China". In 2013, MadeIn Company launched the brand “Xu Zhen”.

In 2014, MadeIn Company founded MadeIn Gallery, a gallery dedicated to the promotion of international artists with an accent on contemporary culture development and communication. Located in M50 Shanghai contemporary art district, MadeIn Gallery aims to be a platform for creativity in China, giving access to the latest artworks of established artists as well as younger and lesser-known talents. MadeIn Gallery was featured in the China Focus Section of the Armory Show in New York in March 2014. On this occasion, detailed images of the series Under Heaven by Xu Zhen, commissioned artist of the Armory, was featured in all the visual promotional materials.

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