Chen Zhen

Barbara Farber-Laserre, Chateau Vallat
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2001

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and richer in the original, with more terracotta hues to the cowhide. Condition: This work is in very good original condition. As is visible in the catalogue illustration, there are a number of irregularities throughout the various found components, all of which are inherent to the artist's choice of media.
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Shanghai-born Chen Zhen is one of the most compelling of the Chinese artists who achieved international recognition during the '90s. His work offers us an opportunity to negotiate the axis of meaning around which globalization is evolving. With no grand aspiration to challenge the so-called hegemonic Western centred civilization that originated the notion of contemporary art and the alleged artistic repression of the 'Other' cultures,  Chen Zhen invites the viewer to accept instead what he calls the 'eternal misunderstanding' of which a work of art is the inevitable carrier, thus negating any consolidated or rigid membership.

Initially trained as a painter, he subsequently concentrated on large scale installations, assembling objects taken from everyday life such as hospital beds, chairs, tables, chamber-pots, cribs and mattresses, and arranging them in compositions systematically deprived them of their original functions. Combined with animal hides and re-contextualised as a musical instrument, the present work is alluding to primitive religious rituals and states of worship.

Throughout his tragically short artistic career, Chen Zhen often implemented his projects in outlandish places and contexts, frequently with the direct involvement of local population. For the artist, art was first and foremost a corporeal experience, and his much acclaimed percussive installation of beds and chairs presented at the 1999 Venice Biennale still echoes in the heads of it visitors.  After installing numerous drums in the heart of Venice, the artist played ardently before inviting the audience to activate the work by drumming, turning the performance into a discharge system in which even the usually moderate and calm visitor got passionately involved.

From 1998-2000, Chen Zhen made a number of works under the theme of Un-Interrupted Voice, a body of work largely considered to be among his finest and the last before his tragic early death in 2000. The present lot epitomizes the artist's ability to create with the use of mundane object installations that are loaded with symbolism, cultural references and personal history producing a brilliant mixture of the spiritual and the mundane. Indeed the Buddhist bells are reminiscent of those that signal practitioners to their daily prayer while the metal minimal bed is indicative of the austere aesthetic of the every-day object of monastic life.

The essential spirit of his work is encapsulated in the notion of 'transexpérience', whereby cultural and human exchanges combine towards a harmonious state of global existence. Constantly traversing philosophical, artistic and cultural boundaries in his work, Chen Zhen operated in an area between Eastern and Western thought, privileging synergy and choice rather than precise and rigid cultural classification. He believed one could be 'open to the world and its contaminations whilst remaining rooted in the individuality of each single story.'
(Lucia Martino cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea di Milano, Chen Zhen, 2003, n.p)