Arthub Favorite: Week Twelve
Opening: April 8,
14:00-16:00 Media preview
16:00-20:00 Opening cocktail
Duration: April 8 – 29, 2016
Open daily from 7:00 am – 12:00 am
Address: Art Yuyuan
1386 Yuyuan Road, Shanghai (Near Dingxi Road)
Does the weather have you down? Arthub is resisting feelings of moroseness by considering what it means to be truly empty. How did we get on this subject you ask? Answer: anticipation over Xu Zhen’s opening this Friday in the heart of Shanghai.
The brand Xu Zhen is pleased to present XUZHEN SUPERMARKET, a critically acclaimed art project. Initially launched in 2007, XUZHEN SUPERMARKET has been featured in several gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and art fairs, including Art Basel Miami, James Cohan Gallery, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, ShanghArt Singapore, Seoul Museum of Art, Long Museum, and Kunsthaus Graz to international acclaim.
Watch a video by Blouin ARTINFO here, to see Xu Zhen’s paradoxical supermarket premiere in 2007 – including an interview with Dr. Xue Liqing, Director of ShanghART Singapore, who spoke about the event’s success. Though very different in its conceptual presentation, in 1999 Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong and Alexander Brandt curated Art for Sale at Shanghai Square. The group show – which included 28 artist interventions – confronted issues of consumerism and art marketability. In Shanghai at this time, an exhibition of this nature was unprecedented and marked a turning point in curated production and artist collaboration.
From an outside perspective, XUZHEN SUPERMARKET looks like a typical franchised Chinese convenience store, with a recognizable logo, a central location, 24/7 hours of operation, in addition to its unsurprising resources – a stockpile of goods that customers take on face value to be everyday necessities. However, upon closer inspection, visitors can see that all the products on sale – although seemingly intact – in fact contain no content or substance at all. The packages are unable to be opened, and customers are left wondering why the farce—why are these seemingly normal packages filled with nothing more than air?
XUZHEN SUPERMARKET takes customers on a journey, complete with three unique twists. First, they are happy to see the shelves packed with alluring products, but because there are so many choices they hesitate to make a decision; finally, upon realizing that the packages before them are devoid of content they are forced to ponder the truth of emptiness. In a physical manifestation of art commodities, Xu Zhen plays with the collapse between the dialectic of art and possession. While subtly alluding to expanding commercial powers, the artist’s store simultaneously explores how capitalism has the ability to exert influences on cultural communication.
The false appearance of the store and the paradoxical merchandise brings to mind Guy Debord’s classic formulation, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to a certain point where it becomes an image.” Resting upon the logic of an equal value exchange of commodities, XUZHEN SUPERMARKET manages to preserve a corner in today’s world for visitors to “fill the void.” By recognizing the physical and literal emptiness around them they are left to confront their own internal, physiological emptiness.
About Xu Zhen (the Brand)
MadeIn Company was established in 2009 in Shanghai by Xu Zhen, it is a contemporary art creation company, focused on the production of creativity, and devoted to the research of contemporary culture’s infinite possibilities. In 2013, MadeIn Company launched the brand “Xu Zhen”. Born in 1977, Xu Zhen is a conceptual artist whose work often takes the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions that confront sociopolitical taboos in contemporary China and freely manipulates western expectations of Chinese art and commerce.
Weibo @徐震XuZhen
Instagram @xuzhenmadein
Facebook.com/xuzhenmadein