Cultural Collisions, Playful Associations: Interview with XU ZHENⓇ

Much like an app, XU ZHENⓇ could be said to be a product of iterative design, cycling through numerous updates to branding and function. As a teenager, he attended the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute. Upon graduating, he moved to Beijing to explore the burgeoning art scene. Instead, he hung out with musicians and spent more time talking about art than making anything. A year later, he was back in Shanghai working for a design firm. He began making videos because it was cheap, and soon enough, by 1999, he was curating exhibitions. By 2000, he had formed BizArt, one of the few non-profit art centers in China. It offered various services and put the earnings back into one of the more experimental art galleries in the country. At 27, he was already featured in the Shanghai Biennale, and the following year his early video work Shouting (1998) was included in the China Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. 

In 2009, Xu Zhen established (and legally changed his name to) MadeIn Company, which has since grown into a sprawling art business that employs dozens of people working in research and development, artistic production, and documentation, as well as running the MadeIn Gallery and merchandise store in Shanghai’s West Bund art district. By 2013, a new iteration was called for, and XU ZHENⓇ, a brand produced by MadeIn Company, was born. 

Mirroring this multifaceted lineage is the sheer diversity in Xu Zhen/MadeIn/XU ZHENⓇ’s output, which seems to encompass all mediums, and samples from any given cultural aesthetic that grabs their attention. 

“Hello,” XU ZHENⓇ’s latest exhibition—and his second at MadeIn Gallery—presents Communication (2019), a new series of glossy reliefs produced using a computer simulation in which cartoon characters were dropped onto a flattened plane from varying heights so that their splattered bodies built up into highly saturated, colored blocks, blurring 2D and 3D, figuration and abstraction. Alongside these is Hello (2018–19), a massive, coiling Corinthian column in the form of an animatronic snake that ominously follows the viewer around the room, blending high culture, technology, and horror-comedy in one. 

Could you summarize your trajectory from Xu Zhen (the individual) to MadeIn Company, and now to XU ZHENⓇ? 

The transformation is a coping mechanism for making work in the modern environment. From 2000 to 2010, my friends and I ran a non-profit called BizArt to support artists, because nothing like that existed. Similarly, in 2006, we started Art-Ba-Ba, the art press, for the same reason. In 2008, the Global Financial Crisis happened, and also the art world became more globalized, and that’s why we started MadeIn. I had been curating big exhibitions every one or two years until 2009, when I realized I needed a team to help, and MadeIn was created to fill that need. Because of the development of the art scene, MadeIn Company tried to remain flexible, dynamic, and responsive.

Where is the line between XU ZHENⓇ and MadeIn, a business that represents multiple artists? Does XU ZHENⓇ have a curatorial role with respect to other artists represented by MadeIn? Are other MadeIn artists involved in the production of work by XU ZHENⓇ?

We are friends, we understand each other because we are all artists, so the roles are not so important. The important thing is for us to share interesting ideas for art. Because artists have free thoughts, after you have the ideas, you need to implement them, and that’s where MadeIn Company comes in, because it has the resources. We all have different roles, but hopefully we all have the same values to make good art.

As for XU ZHENⓇ (the brand), the works are all from Xu Zhen. No other artists are involved in the ideas or production.

I ask because one of the aspects of XU ZHENⓇ’s production is a certain multiplicity, as though the exhibitions come from different people. How to connect a show like “Hello,” for example, with last year’s “Alien,” featuring a life-size prison camp à la Guantanamo?

People are complicated, artists are complicated. Some artists may show only one aspect of their interest or personality, but I want to show my complexity. In reference to the first question, society has been through a huge transformation, so I want to reflect the effects of that transformation on myself. For some artists, they present the time they live; I want to represent the time I live. Hence, commercializing is a very important aspect of that. Commercialization, the speed, the change, and information are all features of the time.

“Alien” featured images of African masks upon Buddhist statuary, iconography that you have explored since 2007. At the press talk, you resisted a political reading of the exhibition. However, one can infer a connection to the current engagement of China in Africa and so-called “dollar diplomacy,” as well as to your previous works, such as the multimedia project The Starving of Sudan (2008). When using African cultural material, is it possible to claim only superficial engagement with the aesthetics while putting responsibility for political readings onto the public? What are your views on appropriation, as an artist from a socio-economic power using images from a culture that has historically been marginalized?

Regarding “Alien,” I didn’t explain the political aspect because that would change the audience’s response to the work. For example, the color of the orange robes on the Han figures can be read by some as a prisoner’s uniform, but others may not see that. So the artist should present some form of reality or fact, instead of educating the audience. 

I don’t view Africa as a marginalized culture. This is a cultural difference. China has never viewed Africa as marginalized or to be taken from—that is a Western perspective. For me, appropriation is not related to that history of appropriation, or colonialism, it is related to information. In the same way that I take images online and use Photoshop to change them, remake them, I use other cultural material for their aesthetics, unrelated to that historic power dynamic. I’m sampling, remixing visual material.

When I made The Starving of Sudan, it was because of the photographer Kevin Carter, and the fact that he committed suicide after taking that photograph [of a vulture and a starving child]. I wanted the audience to sit in his role. The audience asks for that image, they have a responsibility for it, and for what happened afterwards. 

Would you make a work like The Starving of Sudan in 2019?

Would I make it today? I don’t know, the environment has changed.

Tell me about your new exhibition, “Hello.” 

It has this cartoon aspect. Communication is a mix of different cartoon characters, but Hello is also quite playful. The two parts of the exhibition are connected by that playfulness. 

It is also about the stereotype. For example, if you talk about the Great Wall of China, it has a whole set of associations, but if you talk about cartoons they also have their own set of values and associations. [Communication and Hello] are very different, but they express the contradictions in life, and that goes back to exploring my own complexity. 

“Hello” reminds me of Ridley Scott’s Alien films. In the Alien canon, the xenomorph takes on characteristics from whatever host it inhabits, so a human host produces an anthropomorphic alien, a dog will produce a quadruped. The column is a symbol of empire, and one of the characteristics of a successful empire is the way that it, too, adopts features from the cultures that it absorbs, like the way that the Romans incorporated gods from the many nations they colonized.

Yes, Hello is about the coming together of cultures. The Corinthian column is from Greek culture, enmeshed with the idea of a snake, which can be kind of aggressive, so it’s like a cultural inversion. But then it is a new kind of creature, so it follows you, and wants to be close to you. It resembles the state of two different cultures coming into contact with each other. There is a movement sensor, so the column/snake follows you as you move around the room, but the movement is calm. I don’t want to say too much about it. I want the work to speak for itself. Some people may find it scary, but others may find it cute.