CHEN ZHEN – PERROTIN
“Fragments d’éternité”
Galerie Perrotin invites Galleria Continua to organize a retrospective exhibition of Chen Zhen in its three spaces in Paris.
Chen Zhen (1955, Shanghai, China – 2000, Paris, France) is regarded as one of the leading exponents of the Chinese avant-garde and an emblematic international figure of contemporary art. The exhibition, which will occupy all spaces at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, offers a rereading of Chen Zhen’s oeuvre, bringing together approximately 30 iconic works created from 1980 onwards, including several major installations, among which “Le Bureau de change” (1996-2004), conceived by the artist in 1996 and produced after his death. The artist’s immensely rich universe draws from 30 years of personal experience and radically different environments, after going through the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese economic reform and 15 years of living in the West.
The work of Chen Zhen offers multiple ways of interpretation, presenting a sometimes dreamlike and unsettling vision of the world, turned towards an enrichment of interior life. It is his own spiritual life that the artist discovers in the 80s during a retreat in Tibet. Suffering from hemolytic anemia since the age of 25, this spiritual voyage will accompany him throughout his life. During his retreat, he draws scenes from daily life on themes such as “La Naissance”, “Le Pèlerinage”, “Le Défunt” (c.1983-1984). He also creates a series of abstract paintings including “Qi flottant – Fragment” (1984), inspired by the “Great Void”, that perfect equilibrium between the universe and the deep heart of human beings, which is so important for Chen Zhen.
Upon his arrival in Paris in 1986, Chen Zhen finds himself directly confronted to the shock of cultures, but pursues his visionary approach, rooted in the desire to actively participate in building a new world. After three years of research and reflexion, little by little Chen Zhen abandons painting and from 1989 onwards starts working directly with the object to question the relationship between Men, consumer society and nature. For the first time, the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin will show several of Chen Zhen’s paintings in Paris, facing a series of scultpures by the artist. Through fire, one of the natural elements symbolizing the passage from one state to another, Chen Zhen construct glass and metal structures like in “Le Dernier portrait / L’Hibernation” (1991) with coal or in “Bibliothèque” (1999-2000), with burned newspapers, these artificial products, “snapshots of their time”, that are brought back to the natural state of ashes, as if a new beginning was made possible.
Chen Zhen’s work is based on a model of transcultural thought, a concept he described as “Transexperience”: a transcendent place in which the reciprocal friction between various experiences is manifested. It is a dynamic space, a field of energies where tensions and contradictions take shape, but also an area of contact between fluxes of energy. This triple adaptation process which the artist describes as “Residence-Resonance-Resistance”, Chen Zhen experienced it first hand when arriving in Europe. The second phase,
that of “Resonance” between people, countries or cultures, is particularly present in his piece “Round Table – Side by Side” (1997), originally part of a three-table project, from which only two were built. “Side by Side” represents two wooden tables joined in the middle and lined with oriental and occidental chairs. This work touches upon the difficulty of intercultural dialogue, which Chen Zhen describes as “the metaphor of the eternal misunderstanding”, which stems from “how the desire to interact is frequently faced with the impossibility of truly reaching across differences in cultures and ideologies.”
As an exile, Chen Zhen becomes aware of this shock of cultures, this void between the East and the West, which he attempts to fill with his own language, as if he tried to create a link between different forms of knowledge, competence within the fields of art, medicine, ecology and sociology. The references to his birth country are numerous, such as with “Exciting Delivery” (1999), a chrysalid sculpture made out of braided tires, mounted on a bicycle, cultural symbol of a fast-changing China. Another example is “Social Investigation – Shanghai 1” (1997), an ambitious social survey of Chen Zhen’s birth town, which attempts to tell the story of the city’s mutations through a collection of drawings and photographs.