For the work "8848 - 1.86," artist Xu Zhen and his friends reportedly climbed Mount Everest, cut off its peak, and brought it back to Shanghai gallery ShanghART, where the snow covered tip sat in a refrigerated glass display case. Photographs, logs, and a video documented the group’s harrowing expedition, while the oxygen tanks and equipment they supposedly used were also on view, as if to validate the impossible task. Xu’s theatrical approach to the claim was fantastically persuasive: reviewers wrote about the climb and marveled at how the top of the world’s tallest mountain had miraculously been severed, transported, and preserved by a creative and his pals.
Irreverent, snide, and a pro at pulling pranks, the Shanghai-based 37 year old is this year’s commissioned artist for the Armory Show, New York’s international art fair that opens this Thursday, March 6. Tapped in honor of Armory Focus, a curated exhibition within the fair that investigates the culture of a chosen region (it's China this year), Xu will exhibit two limited edition pieces—though no one will know what they’ll look like until opening day. “These works are related to beliefs or conviction,” Xu hinted in an interview earlier this month, by way of a translator. “They are linked to confidence, emptiness, existence, and awareness. It is an artwork that opens up the senses’ consciousness.”
Xu expects Armory Focus to present a “lively, impetuous, promising, and exciting" vision of Chinese art under the guidance of curator Philip Tinari. That's certainly the attitude Xu himself is known for: in 2001, he was the youngest Chinese artist to ever participate in the Venice Biennale (he showed a video, where he lets out blood-curdling cries on bustling city streets and captures the reactions of passers-by). For 2007’s Art Basel Miami Beach, another mega contemporary art fair, Xu transformed the booth of ShanghART into a quintessential Chinese supermarket, complete with packages of food, drinks, and toiletries. Though every product box was empty, everything was for sale—and everything promptly sold, including the shop itself. What Xu had intended to be a mockery of Western culture’s obsession with goods from China turned out to demonstrate exactly that, with the fair’s collectors and gallerists happily (or mindlessly) playing along.
In the performance piece "In Just a Blink of an Eye," Xu recruited two undocumented Chinese immigrants from New York’s Chinatown and brought them to the city’s James Cohan Gallery. Attempting to underline their volatile state, he positioned each participant on a concealed steel brace, which created the perplexing illusion that they were frozen, Street Fighter-style, in mid-air. Once he erected a fake exhibition of Middle Eastern art as a means to underscore the prejudice with which one culture views another. "As we try to observe an [art] object in an objective way, we in fact become aware of its existence," he explained. "My work consists precisely [of] creating a certain curiosity for this self-awareness."
Self-awareness isn't always a painless process. In "Not Doing Anything," Xu smashes a dead cat against a cement floor until it becomes an unrecognizable bloody pulp. With magician-like ease, he’ll make you laugh, gasp, or cry—but can also piss you off or move you to a state of total, dumbfounded awe. So how should one approach this year’s Armory Show? “Please be filled with great expectations,” Xu advises. “Just as before going out for a trip when one cannot find sleep.”
The Armory Focus
Pier 94
12th Avenu
Irreverent, snide, and a pro at pulling pranks, the Shanghai-based 37 year old is this year’s commissioned artist for the Armory Show, New York’s international art fair that opens this Thursday, March 6. Tapped in honor of Armory Focus, a curated exhibition within the fair that investigates the culture of a chosen region (it's China this year), Xu will exhibit two limited edition pieces—though no one will know what they’ll look like until opening day. “These works are related to beliefs or conviction,” Xu hinted in an interview earlier this month, by way of a translator. “They are linked to confidence, emptiness, existence, and awareness. It is an artwork that opens up the senses’ consciousness.”
Xu expects Armory Focus to present a “lively, impetuous, promising, and exciting" vision of Chinese art under the guidance of curator Philip Tinari. That's certainly the attitude Xu himself is known for: in 2001, he was the youngest Chinese artist to ever participate in the Venice Biennale (he showed a video, where he lets out blood-curdling cries on bustling city streets and captures the reactions of passers-by). For 2007’s Art Basel Miami Beach, another mega contemporary art fair, Xu transformed the booth of ShanghART into a quintessential Chinese supermarket, complete with packages of food, drinks, and toiletries. Though every product box was empty, everything was for sale—and everything promptly sold, including the shop itself. What Xu had intended to be a mockery of Western culture’s obsession with goods from China turned out to demonstrate exactly that, with the fair’s collectors and gallerists happily (or mindlessly) playing along.
In the performance piece "In Just a Blink of an Eye," Xu recruited two undocumented Chinese immigrants from New York’s Chinatown and brought them to the city’s James Cohan Gallery. Attempting to underline their volatile state, he positioned each participant on a concealed steel brace, which created the perplexing illusion that they were frozen, Street Fighter-style, in mid-air. Once he erected a fake exhibition of Middle Eastern art as a means to underscore the prejudice with which one culture views another. "As we try to observe an [art] object in an objective way, we in fact become aware of its existence," he explained. "My work consists precisely [of] creating a certain curiosity for this self-awareness."
Self-awareness isn't always a painless process. In "Not Doing Anything," Xu smashes a dead cat against a cement floor until it becomes an unrecognizable bloody pulp. With magician-like ease, he’ll make you laugh, gasp, or cry—but can also piss you off or move you to a state of total, dumbfounded awe. So how should one approach this year’s Armory Show? “Please be filled with great expectations,” Xu advises. “Just as before going out for a trip when one cannot find sleep.”
The Armory Focus
Pier 94
12th Avenu