Why Life - Solo Exhibition of Chen Xiaoyun
2010-09-09 18:47

Opening reception: 26 September 2010, Sunday at 4pm
Duration: September 26 – November 14
Venue: ShanghART Beijing, No.261 Caochangdi
Opening hours: 11am – 6pm (closed on Mondays)

Chen Xiaoyun’s works are always in an artistic and poetic style, with perceptual thinking running through narrative structure, and use individual fragments of consciousness as a ferry to the real world in a video format. His works usually start with a caption, a dialogue, or a motion, being overlapped, refined, and abstracted, to stir up our known world to be crazier and more ridiculous, or more hesitate and more vain.

In his solo exhibition at ShanghART Beijing in September 2010, Chen Xiaoyun exhibits his latest multi-channel video installation work, which rethinks and reinterprets his method of expression, while trying other medium as narrative instrument in the mean time. The work is exhibited in multi-channels, expresses a violent understanding of life, society, lust, love, and memory; images and literatures overlapped and flash, time and space staggered and halt; an atmosphere of sensitivity, deliria, amorousness, frailness, pettiness, and ambiguousness filled in the exhibition room, patiently expresses hysterical personal experience and sampling notes.

Is it a transcendent expression of reality? Or the artist’s self-release? Is it an individual’s helplessness existing in current social configuration? Or as the exhibition title implies, why is it life? Why is it life again? Why is it life all the time? Why not life? It itself was not a problem, but it becomes a problem in a problematic form.


Chen Xiaoyun (1971) was born in Hubei province. Since his participation in the group exhibition ‘Art for Sale’ held in Shanghai in 1999, he started his contemporary art creation and practice in video art, and has become one of the most important experimental artists in the most recent decade. Chen Xiaoyun has participated in various international art exhibition and festivals, including Shanghai Kino at Kunsthalle Bern (2009, Switzerland), 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008, Australia), Havana Biennial 2008, Drapeaux Gril at CAPA-Musee d’art Contemporain (2007, Bordeaux in France), the Busan Biennale 2006 in Korea, Turin Triennial 2006 in Italy, Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art 2005 in Japan, and the 5th Shanghai Biennial (2004).

His recent solo exhibition including: Emerald Tablet held at ShanghART H-Space (2009, Shanghai); Faint at MC (2008, Los Angeles); Love You Big Boss at the Project Gallery (2008, New York).

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