Xu Zhen Performance: In a Blink of an Eye

For the exhibition China! China! China!!! in the UK, Arthub has invited artist Xu Zhen to present the performance/installation In a Blink of an Eye. Xu Zhen’s work is 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 if to testify to an improbable event, only to be entertained by a game constructed impossibly against the laws of physics. 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 PERFORMA 07 in New York.

Installation 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, Beijing based artist, 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 and as an independent curator, he was and still is at the curatorial centre of some of the most important exhibitions in Shanghai. Exhibitions that have shaped the last ten years of artistic development of this city and consequentially of the rest of the country.

Unfortunately little has been written on this important role that Shanghai has come into, via the community of artists based here, but hopefully literature on this matter will be available shortly. To help in this direction, the first section of this exhibition, the prologue, 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.

For the Sainsbury Centre of Arts’s version of China! China! China!!! I added a recent work by Xu Zhen, In 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 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 to the exhibition and as a comment on how the exhibition will develop.

As the subtitle of the exhibition recites “beyond the global market,” this installation stands as a memento of the “instability” that until recently nobody has wanted to really face for too long in the financial market and consequentially in the art market worldwide.

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, people are 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 will then add a magic trick (appearance/disappearance) and a time frame to assist with the “scheduled event”–plays with the elements that Xu Zhen loves: there is a sort of formal construction of the piece, a distance the artist is keeping vis a vis from the artwork produced, and 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 can be seen 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 a Blink of an Eye started Xu Zhen’s research or at least pushed him into going a bit further and question 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 artwork selection that the three curators brought together.