From 1980s, China's contemporary art also choose the popular politics and fashion commercial image as the exterior of the art vision. It attempts to find a new socialization way after the marginalization of intellectuals and the resolution of mainstream politics.
GU Zhenhua depicts the utopian world of human interior during this consumption and technology time. All the animals and background are like fantasy plane with color pieces and cotton print. Although Jenks, an American scholar, said "We already live in a complex world!" ,most of us have more pure dream than we have in the previous time. How is ART shared by those simple, busy and technical people? After anticapitalist and antireligious modernism immerged in the art, it changed basic attitude to consumption and marketing. Nowadays most of us believed consumers obtain elementary humanity through consumption, as well as flexible freedom of choices and independence space through the marketing. Therefore, persons can be compensated from consumption humanity through technology and planarity in the professional society.
The post-modern art practice shows that the cost, which art increase function of fighting for social forces, covers its depth behind and abstract structure with gorgeous appearance. The earliest crab pictures of Gu Zhenhua is not a rich happy image printed on a beautiful cotton cloth, but a trembling crabs scampering on a high-tech armed helicopter. It is a technical and violent allegorical scene. Technology appears every single moment in our daily life, and it is already a pantheism concept. When art is manufacturing fashion image, it is a technology producing beauty at the same time.
The beauty image of Gu Zhenhua with a fragile and pale breath makes the person feels that is just some color, happiness, satisfaction, flamboyant and fantasy. In those behind, humanism and art experiencing a century of secularization and drop from a scholar noble to secular material, then a new mythology is found in technology and consumption fashion. And this is the art and humanism in the eye of 90s artist. In a gorgeous humanism background, fashion can be art, and art will also become fashion. It is more complex than the machine copy times predicted by Benjamin. Because it doesn't mean the comth of fallen angels of art, but it is like in one art work, angels and fallen angles tries to dance together.
GU Zhenhua was born in Shanghai in 1962. He graduated from Shanghai Textile University and East China Normal University. Recent Exhibition includes: Crab, Architecture Space, Shanghai(2007); One by one, ShanghART Group Show, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai(2010); China University Culture, 2008 Contemporary Art Exhibition, New B Gallery, Shanghai(2008).
