Xu Zhen
Solo Exhibition
March 28–May 24, 2015
Long Museum West Bund
Gallery 1 & Corridor Gallery
3398 Longteng Avenue
Xuhui District
Shanghai
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10am–6pm
T +86 (0) 21 64227636
On the occasion of the first anniversary of its inauguration, the Long Museum (West Bund Branch) will host the grand opening of Xu Zhen on March 28. Xu Zhen is an iconic, leading figure within the realm of contemporary Chinese art. Surveying art ancient and new, the artist marshals Chinese and Western cultures and fuses the quintessence of both. Through his meticulous treatment and distinctive integration of global knowledge and information, he generates an infinite degree of creativity.
Xu Zhen (born in 1977 in Shanghai, China) engages in an artistic practice that takes in numerous forms of mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance, among others. Within the 30,000-square-meter space of the Long Museum, this exhibition will showcase over 100 works, which include not only his earlier representative individual works from the late 1990s (Rainbow, Shouting) but also a series of new works produced after Xu Zhen’s MadeIn Company launched the “Xu Zhen” brand in 2013. Highlights include European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture, the new works The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian and Northern Qi Standing Buddha, Amazon and Barbarian from the “Eternity” series, as well as the series MadeIn Curved Vase, Metal Language and Corporate.
The exhibition’s advertising slogan—”Witness the Creation of History”—brings to light the sense in which this exhibition echoes history and cultural innovation. At the same time, this equally signals a breakthrough and a leap forward in the artist’s career. It may appear as a matter of course that history is considered a symbol of the past, an exemplar of culture, and a cipher of tradition, and yet Xu Zhen continually breaks down this predetermined mode of thought, deploying everything from within the farrago of global culture. He inherits history and is broadly nourished by tradition; taking up a stance replete with cultural self-confidence and a high degree of cultural reflexivity, he lives for the contemporary.
With his characteristic humor, Xu Zhen intervenes in all manners of subject matter concerning global culture. With a taut expressiveness, he ingeniously integrates a Western spirit with Eastern culture—a new culture which transcends traditional schemas is hereby born.
In the globalized post-Internet contemporary, Xu Zhen has continually pioneered forms of artistic creation. As an artist, he also tackles the roles of the curator, entrepreneur, and gallerist. Amid these interchanging identities, he nevertheless ensures that the creation maintains a high degree of consistency and leads MadeIn Company to expand comprehensively in cultural fields—developing curatorial production, research and publications, from galleries to limited-edition artworks. By initiating each of these, he practices what he preaches: the core concept of “producing creativity.”
Long Museum
The Long Museum is a private museum founded by the Chinese collector-couple Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei. Currently, Long Museum consists of two large museums in Pudong, Shanghai as well as on the Xuhui Riverfront—the Long Museum (Pudong Branch) and Long Museum (West Bund Brand) respectively—making for a distinctive artistic ecology of “two museums in one city.” Long Museum is presently the private museum with the greatest scale and with the greatest collecting power domestically in China, with a rich collection and comprehensive system. It takes on the mission of promoting artistic development and cultural inheritance all the while being rooted domestically; at the same time, Long Museum pays great attention to the contrasting presentation and research of ancient and contemporary art and of Eastern and Western cultures. The museum seeks to showcase the plurality of the visual arts from a global perspective and comprehensively and systematically present the magnificent accomplishments of Chinese art and the fresh vitality of contemporary world art.
