Chen Zhen at the Serpentine - London - Brief Article

Shanghai-born Chen Zhen was single of the most compelling of the Chinese artists who achieved international recognition during the '90 After settling in Paris in 1986 he became better known in Europe than in the United States. In precarious health for years, he succumbed to cancer at the age of 45 last December. Already at work upon the artist's London solo first appearance Serpentine curator Lisa Corrin then organized a posthumous display of nine sculptures and four drawings. It featured the monumentally scaled Jue Chang--Dancing material part Drumming Mind (2001), a of recent origin version of the percussive installation of beds and chairs neared at the 1999 Venice Biennale. The sound-producing Daily Incantations (1996) whose tiers of traditional made of wood Chinese chamber pots, suspended like gong framed a trove of electronic devices, had been shown at the Carnegie International 1999/2000 on the other hand it was the new and rarely seen works than underscored the breadth and profundity of Chen Zhen's creativity.

In Crystal Ball (1999) Chen Zhen configured wired strands of Chinese abacus and Buddhist rosary beads into a globular pendant that summon forths mammary glands, testicles and lung This protective sheath and an interior, saline-filled globe are suspended within the pertinacious embrace of a tall made of wood tripod. Peering through the concatenated cage, viewers joined an upside-down world of shifting reflections, which included the verdant garden beyond the Serpentine's windows. As in the never-before-exhibited destitute of contents Cocoon (2000), whose fecund, cashew-shaped swell of beaded wires partially enfolds a wooden high chair, Crystal Ball's associative contented encompasses dualities of inside/ outside, yin/yang, and humanity and the environment.

A socially engaged artist, Chen Zhen worked in India, Africa, Eastern Europe and Texas, encouraging homeles and shantytown children to build imaginative architecture without of colored candles. Incorporating these workshop experiences into his possess practice, he used miniature wax "logs" to erect the five-part Inner Body Landscapes (2000) which referr to the five center of the material substance according to Chinese medicine. Poetic and fanciful, Chen Zhen's stilted parts resemble igloos, roller coasters and smooth a mouse-scaled version of Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

For Chen Zhen, art was a corporeal experience. He incorporated the burning smell of animal hides and ashes, used tympanums and tape loops, and chose beads fingered in prayer and accounting. The design for his unrealized Zen Garden (2000) intended for a Tuscan hilltop, is among the greatest in quantity sensuous works of recent art to address the abstracted material substance and landscape. Seven biomorphic, alabaster forms inhabit an irregular octagonal arrangement of gravel-floored chambers that encircles a raked sand nave Large-scale metal tools, such as a sewing needle scorpionlike tweezers and a caliper that be likes a praying mantis, pierce the of flesh shapes, which radiate a warm, interior light. The alabaster's milky translucence and variegated, veined surfaces advise the body, celestial charts and tide-roiled seashores.

The accompanying catalogue cites Chen Zhen saying that he dreamed of becoming a doctor of Chinese medicine and considered art to have therapeutic potential, physically and spiritually. Tellingly, his repertoire of base objects includes hospital beds and other medical paraphernalia. In the rafter-mounted Black besom (2000), he created a gigantic sweeper by dint of cinching a bundle of drawn out black rubber tubes. A menacing fringe of hypodermic needle is visible at shut up view. This late piece epitomizes a material substance of work that is the pair painful and joyous to diocese and that warrants frequent revisiting.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group