Late Shanghai artist to get first hometown solo show

Almost a decade after artist Chen Zhen angered Shanghai censors with his acerbic work "Gaming Table" linking money, chamber pots and military strategy, the city is to host his first solo exhibition.

But Chen, who died in December 2000, won't be able to reflect on the changes in China and the contemporary art scene which has enabled 14 of his works to go on display in his first solo show in his hometown.

The Shanghai-born artist was just 45 when he died in Paris from an incurable blood disorder from which he had suffered for some 20 years.

The knowledge that he was living on borrowed time fuelled Chen's artistic passion, and drove him to complete an extraordinary number of works, many of which are gigantic installations, in a little over a decade after moving to France in 1986.

"Chen Zhen was someone extraordinary, with a huge heart. He could really do things. He can contribute to humanity, and he had an important mission to show the world through his art," said his widow, Xu Min.

She has now adopted that mission as her own, determined that his artistic vision should live on as long as possible.

After first training as a painter in Shanghai, Chen quickly abandoned the medium once he arrived in Paris, humbled by the masterpieces he saw in museums such as the Louvre and fascinated by the consumer society he found in the West.

"He was so shocked by the excesses. In China everything was kept in the back of the stores and there were only one or two things on display. Yet here he saw things lying about in the streets, just abandoned," Xu said.

So Chen's first works in Paris -- when he was not earning money painting portraits of tourists in the streets outside the Pompidou Centre -- were aimed at giving a second life to discarded consumer goods.

Set into the form of shrine altars, Chen married objects such as an old typewriter and a window blind, rescuing them and reconverting them into a work of art.

"People's desires lead to an excess of material goods that upset the balance of nature with negative effects on human existence. It's a vicious circle," Chen said, explaining the inspiration behind his works.

In the early 1990s he turned his eye on the press, creating large installations burning hundreds of newspapers and displaying the ashes, to illustrate his belief that the media has nothing of lasting importance to say.

It was following his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1990, that Chen's career began to take off as he fast gained a reputation for making art that married Western and Eastern concepts and spirituality, as well as his interest in medicine and the human body.

Some of his works no longer exist, having been conceived as ephemeral -- such as a giant installation on a Dutch landfill site featuring a truck equipped with wooden wings and dragging a net tied with plastic bags over a 35-hectare (86-acre) site.

Others are dismantled and well stored such as "Precipitous Parutition", a dragon made out of hundreds of old bike tyres, a comment on the arrival of capitalism in China when old bikes were being cast aside in favour of new cars.

Xu, who managed to join her husband with her son a few years later in Paris, remains wary of the censors that forced Chen to adapt his "Gaming Table" in order for it to be displayed at the Shanghai Biennale in 1996.

With the help of an Italian gallery, Galleria Continua which supported Chen during his lifetime, she organised an exhibition of her late husband's work in Beijing last year, which is now set to open in the Shanghai Art Museum.

But she admits she was careful in selecting which works to put on display.

"Why take the risk? Things are better in China than they were, but you still can't say and do just anything you like. It's still quite closed.

"There is no law saying you can't do something. It all comes down to one person on the day and I'm not going to take the risk. Better to make a selection first."

Chen's show "Transexperiences" opens in Shanghai on February 24 to March 19. "Gaming Table", a stylised pool table featuring 36 balls daubed with military strategies resting on a bed of Chinese coins, with chamber pots waiting for use underneath, will not be on show.

But visitors will get to see and play his huge work "Fifty Strokes to Each" which contains 55 chairs, and 10 wooden beds stretched with skins and hung from a wooden loom to represent a huge drum.

The aim is meant to be therapeutic, said Xu, a kind of gigantic communal massage for the body and soul. "I want to pass on Chen's message, that we can transform our lives, realise our dreams through contemporary art but at the same time question our actions."

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AFPEntertainment-art-France-China

AFP 091223 GMT 02 06

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