For the exhibition China! China! China! in UK, Arthub has invited the artist Xu Zhen to present the performance/installation “in a blink of an eye”, a sort of “manifestation” of the globalized market where Chinese workers are symbolically and literally “suspended” in disquieting actions -as if a tragedy is about to occur- but instead does not happen.
A suspension that, as suggested by the title, disappears in “ a blink of an eye”: the public will look at this installation for a short while, as to testify an improbable event, only to be entertained by the game of impossible physical laws. They will stay blind about the inevitable and total tragedy represented by these workers: as if their lives have been removed.
This installation is presented for the first time in Europe. Previously, it was shown at Long March Project in Beijing as well as during PERFORMA07 in New York.
Introduction
by Davide Quadrio
Xu Zhen is a very unique personality in the contemporary art world in China. Trained in a design school, he started working as an artist with an incredibly clear vision about his definition of art. Defined by Qiu Zhijie, thinker and artist based in Beijing, as playing the “too smart” conceptual card, Xu Zhen has been creating in the last decades some of the most refreshing, irreverent and anecdotic works of his generation. Moreover as director of BizArt or as independent curator, he was and still is at the curatorial centre of some of the most important exhibitions in Shanghai that shaped the last ten years of the artistic development of this city and consequentially of the rest of the country. Unfortunately still little has been written on this important role that Shanghai has got in China via the community of artists based here and hopefully literature on this matter will shortly be available. To help in this direction, the first section of this exhibition, the prologue, it is about dissemination of information on the still hidden history of contemporary art in China and gives visual information of the recent past of the three cities Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai as well.
For the Sainsbury Centre of Arts’s version of China!China!China!!! I added a recent work by Xu Zhen, “In Just a Blink of an Eye” presented before in Beijing, Long March Space and in New York during Performa, 2007. This work is now for the first time presented to the European public in an original out-door version. This piece co-produced by ArtHub, has a particular significance in the actual context of the economic situation worldwide. Even if probably the concept of Xu Zhen’s was not at all related to this matter, I like to think of it as a sort of prelude of the exhibition and as the comment on what the exhibition will develop.
As the subtitle of the exhibition recites “beyond the global market” this installation stands as a memento of a too long “instability” that nobody wanted really to face in the financial market and consequentially in the art market worldwide until recent.
To go back to the work presented here, “In Just a Blink of an Eye”, at first sight, this work seems to defy possibility. In this open space facing the main gallery of Sainsbury Art Center are people completely tilted, as if ready to collapse, but they stay still, frozen in a time-space fragment. In the presentation for Performa in New York we read:
” Although the optical illusion can be surmised to be accomplished through a metal frame upon which the model lays upon, the work nonetheless serves to create an anxiety within the viewer that is at once exhilarating, as if the viewer has been liberated from the constraints of time and physics, as well as debilitating, in the failure to see the action resolved.”
In my vision, this work is conceptually more complicated.
Formally this installation - that in this case will be presented as a performance and it will add then a magic trick (appearance-disappearance) and a time frame to assist to the “scheduled event”-, plays with the elements that Xu Zhen loves: there is a sort of formal construction of the piece, a distance that artist is keeping vis a vis of the artwork is producing, a coolness that seems to be one of the main characteristic of Xu Zhen’s work. Yet, here there is the important component of the human, ethnically Chinese, that brings the audience immediately back to deal with matters of cultural systems, differences, migration and labour to touch problems that might deal with racism. In fact, the work is performed by migrants recruited in the area, people who bring a story of their own. The immobility of these figures or collective personas creates snap shots that the public need to digest, slowly, with the unique privileged of the extended but pre-determined time-space that the installation/performance will offer.
I think that this is probably the strongest point of the aesthetic and the concept of this piece that, somehow, we can see in many other works by Xu Zhen. In his recent solo exhibition, called “Impossible is Nothing” in Beijing, Long March Space, December 2008, Xu Zhen’s irreverent questions are more than ever at the centre of his preoccupations.
In the subtitle of the exhibition we read:
“Limit vs. boundary: a psychological need or biological fact?
For how long can a human being exist in observed isolation?
Live in, live within, lived observed, lived mediated…. Social reality or lived assumption?
What is the difference between lived and observed reality?
Condition vs. principle: a historical fact or mediated fiction?”
Somehow “In Just a Blink of an Eye” started Xu Zhen’s research or at least pushed him into going a bit further and questions the position of art as commentary of our constructed socio-political reality. For this reason, this piece stresses one more time the significance of the curatorial approach of this exhibition and creates a dramatic starting point that I hope will stimulates the viewer to engage with the rich documentation and artworks selection that the three curators brought together.
