Chen Zhen

Description

This catalogue raisonné provides new possibilities for analysis and comparison within Chen Zhen’s entire oeuvre. Since 2008, a research team has undertaken a meticulous and systematic study of the artist’s archives in collaboration with collectors, galleries, museums, public and private institutions, exhibition curators, and his friends. Chen Zhen’s catalogue raisonné is the exhaustive inventory of the authenticated work of the artist, catalogued chronologically in two volumes: the first covers the years 1978-96, the second 1997-present. Isabelle Renard and Xu Min’s brilliant essay, guiding us through Chen Zhen’s work, is one of the major contributions to this catalogue: it places the artworks in their historic context and highlights the key periods in his creative development. Chen Zhen was a privileged witness of economic and cultural globalization, and particularly of the gulf dividing China and the Western world. A stranger under his own regime at home and a foreigner in France, where he moved in 1986, Chen Zhen was on the margins of two systems, looking for his own way through them. In the context of this “double exile,” he found himself specially receptive to cultural assimilation, which became the basic premise of his creativity. Chen Zhen’s works question the world, question humanity and its relations with the environment in order to establish a trans-cultural discourse and mode of thought. A new language, a new way of life taking into account a dimension that is spiritual and technological, material and immaterial at one and the same time.