Opening: 23 April 2011, Saturday at 4pm

Exhibition Duration: April 24^th – May 31^st, 2011

Venue: ShanghART Beijing

Address: No. 261 Caochangdi, Old Airport Road, Beijing 100015

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Telephone: +86 (0)10 6432 3202

ShanghART Beijing is pleased to present a solo show by Yang Zhenzhong – Don’t Move. Timed to coincide with Caochangdi Photospring 2011 in Beijing, this exhibition shall present both photography and video works by Yang that explore ideas relating to identity and narrative.

The main ground floor gallery shall be taken over by an immersive video installation, Don’t Move, which features 12 video projections of faces uttering the phrase “don’t move”, which also means “freeze!” in Chinese. The illuminated faces surround the audience in the dark exhibition hall as they each move, shake, and shudder in different orientations. The random timing of the uttered word from all four directions creates a soft disorientation that is intensified by the movement of the faces affected by the camera. The person uttering the word doesn’t move, only the camera moves. This work was originally created for the public environment at Shanghai Fuxin Park in 2001.  

In the smaller ground floor gallery, Yang shall show Spring Story, an important work from 2003 that has never been shown in Beijing. Originally created for the Siemens Arts Programme, Yang worked with over 1,500 employees of Siemens Shanghai Mobile Communications Ltd. to create a recitation of a seminal speech by Deng Xiaoping known as the “Southern Campaign Speech”. This speech, made in 1992 during Deng Xiaoping’s tour of southern China to gauge the success of his Opening Up Reforms, was used to garner support for the economic policies that now define China’s 30 year economic growth. Yang asked each employee to recite just a few words from the speech without giving any context, and edited the result to create the entire speech. Each employee, embodying their role in a production line, recreated the speech part by part – the speech that paved the way for this factory, and their jobs, to exist.

Yang Zhenzhong has created a new work for the upstairs gallery: Wrong Way Round is a series of double portraits of people from all walks of life wearing their clothes or uniforms back to front. Each double portrait consists of a photograph of the person facing the camera and with their back to the camera. Either their face shows or their formal/social identity shows, but the two cannot coincide.

This group of three works each deal with identity and narrative as two separate aspects of reality that we often take for granted as being naturally contiguous. Yang has dissected the different aspects of this reality and rearranged them in a way that gives poetic insight to its mechanisms, and shows that what can be constructed can be taken apart.

Yang Zhenzhong (1968) was born in Hangzhou, now he lives and works in Shanghai. He began working with photography, installation, video and multi-media in 1994, and also initiated some exhibitions. Yang Zhenzhong’s work has been showed at major biennales and triennials including Venice Biennale (2007, 2003), Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006), Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (2005), Guangzhou Triennial (2005, 2002), Shanghai Biennale (2004, 2002), etc. His recent solo exhibitions include: Overpass (Canvas International Art, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2008); Yang Zhenzhong (Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Denmark, 2008); Foreplay (ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai, 2006); Yang Zhenzhong (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, U.K., 2006), etc.