Jue Chang, Dancing Body - Drumming Mind (Last Song), 2000
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.
Chen Zhen, 'Field of Synergy', 2000
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.
Gerald Matt, curator of the exhibition
Chen Zhen
Until 2 September
Kunsthalle Vienna
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Vienna
T: +43 1 52189 0
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