The China Project

113 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection CHEN Zhen One of the most striking qualities of Chen Zhen’s practice was his ability to create harmony through difference. Using personal experiences of illness, the human body and medicine as metaphor, Chen Zhen’s work engages with the often antagonistic relationship between the individual and society, the material and spiritual, and inside and outside. Referencing Chinese medical theories of ‘organic wholeness’, Chen Zhen’s mixed media installations bring together sound and everyday materials such as computers, abacus beads, chamber pots, candles and beds into a complete entity often reminiscent of the human body. Originally trained as a painter in China, Chen Zhen began working in installation after migrating to Paris in 1996 and as part of his studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques. Interested in combining traditional Chinese philosophy with Western avant-garde practices, Chen Zhen chose mixed media because it enabled him to engage the physical world in a spiritual, ritualistic way, as well as to confront issues of globalisation and the negative influence of Western consumer society. A surplus of consumer commodities helped to form the structure of Chen Zhen’s works, which are equally informed by Chinese symbols and beliefs. The disparate cultures, social contexts and aesthetic approaches that Chen Zhen mobilises reflect both his interest in cross-cultural social dynamics and his desire to invent new languages to redeem an inharmonious world. Invocation of a washing fire 1999 references traditional Chinese ideas of alchemy as a process that involves cooling down, purifying and harmonising fire through water. Taking the form of a metaphorical furnace, the work is composed of a range of materials including Chinese chamber pots, thousands of tiny abacus beads, loudspeakers and technological consumer goods such as computers and television sets. Audio recordings of women cleaning chamber pots in busy Shanghai streets emanate from the work. Heated at a furious pace, and rumbling with the continuous sound of this washing, the work invites the audience to consider the need for medical–alchemical treatment to cool down the global fever of materialism. In this work, Chen Zhen ultimately sought to confront issues of globalisation and the influence of Western consumerism in China, to restore a balance between the material and the spirit. The use of (often broken) electronic objects such as calculators, computers and televisions in the belly of the furnace represents the detritus of Asia’s desire to progress; here, Western consumer goods represent an illness. About Invocation of a washing fire , Chen Zhen said: ‘The project deals with an ironical and critical metaphor in insinuating a “medical–alchemical treatment” for the inner disease of Asia’s success and its crises’. 1 Chen Zhen exhibited widely in Asia and abroad, and was one of a group of Chinese émigré artists responsible for the growing interest in Chinese contemporary art that developed during the 1990s. He tragically died of a rare and chronic illness in 2000. endnote 1 Chen Zhen, artist statement in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, p.198. Invocation of washing fire 1999 Timber frame, metal, sound, abacus beads, wooden chamber pots, red light globes, broken calculators, cash registers, computers and television sets / 300 x 240 x 240cm (approx.) / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1999 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899–1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation