Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
September 18 - December 31, 2002
The Chinese-born, Paris-based artist CHEN ZHEN (1955-2000) poetically employs both his study of traditional Chinese culture and his knowledge of Western avant-garde art to create artwork that engages with contemporary social issues. In the first U.S. survey of this internationally recognized artist's work since his death, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will present a carefully chosen group of Chen Zhen's ambitious installations and sculptural pieces created during the last five years of his life. "Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes" is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art.
"The art of Chen Zhen draws you into an experience that is both familiar and foreign, crossing boundaries of geography, aesthetics, and disciplines," says Jill Medvedow, James Sachs Plaut Director of the ICA. "We are privileged to have organized this major exhibition of Zhen's work with the cooperation of his widow, Xu Min, who worked closely with the artist in realizing most of his installations.""Chen Zhen's work is often profoundly personal," says Gilbert Vicario, Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, "reflecting seemingly opposite Eastern and Western approaches to medicine as a metaphor for art-making, global politics, and philosophy. Zhen's aim of establishing a dialogue between the everyday materials of consumer society, human beings, and nature results in giving these materials new meaning."
Chen Zhen's enormous, viewer-interactive piece Jue Chang (50 Strokes to Each) (1998), which will fill the ICA's entire first floor gallery, deals metaphorically with the notion of conflict and misunderstanding among people in a general, global context. The flat surfaces of more than a hundred chairs and beds collected from different parts of the world have been stretched with animal skins to create makeshift drums that are hung from a large, rustic-looking wooden frame. Visitors are encouraged to play this artwork turned percussion instrument. A series of five interconnected sculptures made from hundreds of multi-colored candles, which are traditionally thought of as a symbol of an individual's life, make up the installation Inner Body Landscape (2000). This installation takes inspiration from the traditional Chinese belief that one must treat the entire body rather than just the disease.
The exhibition also features Chen Zhen's last work, Zen Garden (2000), a model for a public garden exploring the fusion of two views of medicine--Chinese and Western--in relation to the human body. Representations of major body organs made of alabaster, pierced by such metal medical instruments as forceps, tweezers, and scissors, hover illuminated over raked sand. In Black Broom (2000), whose theme is similar to Zen Garden's, an ordinary broom becomes menacing with a brush that is made of black transfusion tubing with hypodermic needles at the ends. Crystal Ball (1999), a spherical flask filled with saline solution surrounded by an organic cage made of abacus and prayer beads, and Crystal Landscape of Inner Body (2000), exquisite pieces of blown glass representing different internal organs, complete the exhibition.
Born in Shanghai, China, Chen Zhen, who came of age during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, attended the Shanghai Fine Arts and Crafts school and the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution ended, he became interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy (which was forbidden under Maoist rule) and Western avant-garde art forms as an alternative to the official cultural ideology espoused by the government. During his early career, Chen Zhen pursued painting, which he abandoned in favor of installation after immigrating to Paris in 1986 to attend the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques. Chen Zhen had a rare medical condition called autoimmune hemolytic anemia that eventually took his life in December 2000.
The Institute of Contemporary Art's relationship with Chen Zhen extends back to 1998, when he participated in the group exhibition "The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers," at the ICA. His piece Opening of Closed Center (1996) dealt metaphorically with the collision between his own culture and that of the Shakers through a visual manifestation of the complex relationship between space, time, and spirituality.
During the last decade, Chen Zhen's work has been presented at venues throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, including large group exhibitions such as "First Shanghai Biennale" at the Shanghai Art Museum, and "Unmapping the Earth and Trade Routes: History and Geography" at the second Johannesburg Biennale. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Centre International d'Art contemporaine de Montréal; Deitch Projects, New York; National Maritime Museum Stockholm; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and ADDC-Espace Culturel François Mitterand, Périgueux.
INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA
955 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02115
