the last few mosquitoes & from inside the body
The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is a rising star of the new Chinese art. At age twenty-seven he is part of a young generation whose members have achieved attention on an international stage. Official recognition of contemporary art is a recent development in China, where censorship of exhibitions was only relaxed in the 1990s. The rapid development of the Chinese economy has involved an opening up to global capital, and perhaps this has led to an acceptance of the powerful form of cultural capital embodied in the international art market. In 2001 Xu Zhen represented China at the Venice Biennale, and in 2005 was part of the first official pavilion sponsored by the Chinese government.
As part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Spacement showed Xu Zhen’s video ‘From Inside the Body’. It was originally part of the group exhibition ‘Art For Sale’, a mock supermarket staged in a Shanghai mall in 1999 that was soon closed down by government officials. It included such unusual items as jars of pureed human brains by artist Zhu Yu, and a video by Hu Jieming showing the artist masturbating. Xu Zheng’s contribution was relatively mild in comparison. ‘From Inside the Body’ shows three screens depicting the same room with an ordinary brown vinyl couch. As described by Xu, ‘the left one recorded the actions of a man, the right recorded a woman, and the middle, both. The man came in first and became aware of an indefinable smell. To find out where the smell was coming from, he took off his clothes and started smelling himself. Then a woman entered and did the same. Finally, they began sniffing each other’s naked bodies’