<< BACK

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
212-714-9500
New York
Front Gallery
Xu Zhen
SHANGHART SUPERMARKET
September 6-
October 4, 2008

Chinese conceptualist Xu Zhen will transform the front gallery into a replica of a Shanghai convenience store, as he did previously for Art Basel Miami Beach 2007. With all packages for sale at Chinese prices, yet empty of their contents, Zhen's installation is a project in which the rules of the game for both art and the global market are — seemingly — collapsed.

In his work Xu Zhen interrogates complex and sensitive terrain that — on first encounter — never seizes to invoke ambiguity when it comes to the real meaning intended. His compelling oeuvre is marked by a sense of antagonism towards its environment, a friction with its context that resists conformity and instead exerts its own terms of engagement.

Accordingly, his new project SHANGHART SUPERMARKET effectively elaborates, manipulates, and invents upon a delicate matrix of power relations. His installation, thus, is a full-scale replica of what is alleged to be a proto-typical Chinese convenient store. One of these (meticulously copied 1:1 and renamed by the artist) only to be transplanted across the Pacific and set up in the United States. Ironically, while the genealogy and aesthetic of these Chinese shops are inherently Western in aspiration, they are effectively promoted and encouraged by the communist government as a tool to specifically resist the establishment of their foreign counterparts (i.e. Western chains of convenient stores). With their easily recognizable corporate logos, and with the immense frequency of their layout scattered in thousands throughout the country, they have become unavoidable icons in the Chinese urban landscape. Open 24 hours a day, these franchised stores provide consumers with all imaginable basic products needed. Shelves filled with an eclectic mix of well-known international goods, such as soft drinks, cigarettes and dairy, intermingle with Chinese pickles, dried fruits, toiletry, newspapers, and rice wine. Upon entering Xu Zhen’s installation, however, one immediately senses a difference. This store is filled with packages and wrappings containing, literally, nothing! Everything is empty, just shells. The false appearance of the shop, or of the ghostly merchandise as such, indicate that there is much more at stake than the obvious critique of exchange value. It is an artwork that is paradoxically defined by emptiness and lack of content, its most distinguished characteristic being hollowness: In other words, a spectacle in its purest effect. And the spectacle, to recall Guy Debord’s classic formulation, ‘is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’. The ambiguous status of the supermarket, which has been stripped of all its defining qualities, seems to indicate that consumption, whether of food or images, is essential, but it also destroys. Xu Zhen’s SHANGHART SUPERMARKET is both an appropriation of economic strategy, and its very negation. The shop is the stage for a world of role-changes between artworks and the real and the imaginary, and more importantly perhaps, between the East and the West. China has recently become the core country of global controversy regarding its expanding trade practices, including rejected food shipments contaminated with pesticides and banned drugs. With each revelation of exported filthy food and other equally dubious product lines, China’s special brand of capitalism looks increasingly suspicious to Western sensibilities. So, are the Chinese effectively trying to conquer corporate America by its own mean, or are they merely following their late President Deng Xiaping’s seductive, but obscure, maxim ‘to get rich is glorious’? Equally, the uncertainty remains whether SHANGHART SUPERMARKET is targeted as a critique of Western or Chinese standards.

The project raises intriguing questions about representation, image ownership, and production process, distribution and audience reception. It also addresses authorship notions, authenticity, fiction, and reality. Xu Zhen turns the shop into an object of critical play and frames the system of exchange value with parody. He plays on the collapse of art dialectic and commodity, but precisely in the form of art-commodity. A critical distance is created from within by displaying empty ghost-like goods for sale. While subtly alluding to China’s expanding powers, the store simultaneously reframes the coding of merchandise and artifacts — how objects are translated into cultural exempla, invested with value, and acknowledged by viewers and consumers.

Xu Zhen was born in 1977 and lives and works in Shanghai. He was invited to the 49th Venice Biennale and has since exhibited his works widely. Recent exhibitions include Performa07, 10th International Istanbul Biennale (2007) China Power Station: Part II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, (Oslo, Norway, 2007), Part I, Battersea Power Station, (London, UK, 2006), On Mobility, De Appel, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2006), China Contemporary – Art, Architecture and Visual Culture, Museum Boijmanns van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2006), The Thirteen – Chinese Video Now, PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York, 2006).

Xu Zhen, SHANGHART SUPERMARKET, 2007, mixed media installation (cash register, counter, shelves, refrigerator, fridge, multiple consumer products), 6 x 5,5 m (dimensions variable).

Xu Zhen, SHANGHART SUPERMARKET, 2007, mixed media installation (cash register, counter, shelves, refrigerator, fridge, multiple consumer products), 6 x 5,5 m (dimensions variable).

Xu Zhen, Rainbow, 1999, Video, la Biennale de Venezia. 49, Projector, DVD, Color, Stereo.

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York
212-714-9500
Xu Zhen, Just Did It
February 2-March 8, 2008

Xu Zhen has become well known in recent years for creating videos, installations, photographs and performances that challenge common perceptions of "truth." His coyly provocative works draw our attention to ideas about territory and possession.

The exhibition at James Cohan Gallery will include three works. Featured in the main gallery will be a spare new sculpture entitled It, consisting of a tiny speck of mud viewable through a microscope. One viewer at a time discovers that the minute sculpture depicts the famous image of Neil Armstrong's first footprint on the moon. With this installation, Xu Zhen continues his ongoing investigation of fact and fiction by referencing the controversial debate over the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing. Various conspiracy theorists claim that during the Cold War era, the United States government faked the American lunar landing in its haste to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Thus, by creating a faux artifact from a possible non-event, Xu highlights the media's role in directing modern-day history and poses the question: where do we stand?

The exhibition features two of Xu Zhen's recent video works, 18 Days, 2006 and 8848-1.86, 2005. In the premiere installation of 8848-1.86 at the 2005 Yokohama International Triennale in Japan, a "documentary" video showed the artist and a team of expert climbers sawing off a 1.86 meter tip of Mount Everest; the verisimilitude of this feat was underscored by the installation of a refrigerated case that enclosed the icy mountain peak (not included in this exhibition). The skeptical audience in Yokohama was further confused by a coincidental Chinese news report that the mountain's height was 4 meters less than its previous measurement of 8,848 meters. As Hans Ulrich Obrist summarizes, "it is precisely this slippery character of socially accepted reality that Xu calls 'mobile public fact,' something the artist addresses often in a practice that is noticeable for its political punch."

18 Days, another video produced in documentary style, records a collaborative trip the artist took with a group of friends in 2006, during which he planned to "invade" China's neighboring countries Myanmar, Mongolia and Russia. A series of mishaps and unsuccessful attempts finally resulted in a successful crossing at the border with Myanmar; an invasion we are told in a voice-over that was achieved with an arsenal of remote-control operated toy weapons.

Most recently, at the 2007 Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, Xu created an exact replica of a Shanghai convenience store in which all of the objects for sale were real product packaging emptied of their content. Complete with a cash register and uniformed employees, the installation was not only transportative, but was also a clever commentary on the commercial context of the art fair.

His work has been shown internationally and was recently included in Performa07, NY; the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); Art Unlimited 2007 at ArtBasel 38; China Power Station: Part II, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); and The Real Thing — Contemporary Art from China at Tate Liverpool (2007). Xu was also included in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and represented China at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005). Xu Zhen was born in 1977 and lives and works in Shanghai.