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徐震: 没顶公司出品
XU Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production
开幕时间：2014年1月18日下午5点至7点
展览时间：2014年1月19日至4月20日
展览地点：尤伦斯当代艺术中心，北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术区4号路
Opening: Jan 18th, 2014, 5pm - 7pm
Duration: Jan 19th - Apr 20th, 2014
Venue: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA),
798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
艺术家徐震(现居于上海)的大型中期回顾展，探讨其关于地缘政治主体性和中国及国际当代艺术现状的观念表达与实践。
尤伦斯当代艺术中心 (UCCA)即将于2014年1月18日至4月20日期间推出展览“徐震：没顶公司出品”。徐震是中国当代艺术领域的标志性人物之一，他对今天极尽庞杂交汇的全球信息有着强烈求知欲和独特的整合能力，广泛地吸收知识并从中生产跨平台和跨媒介的作品，是上海艺术界的领军者和出生于1980年代后的中国年轻艺术家的引路人之一。展览由UCCA馆长田霏宇和UCCA首席策展人蔡秉桥联合策划。
徐震 (1977年生于中国上海) 的艺术实践涉及众多媒介，包括绘画、雕塑、机械装置、录像、摄影和行为等，且经常糅杂于一件作品中。“徐震：没顶公司出品”在UCCA大展厅呈现，包括逾50件装置、10件录像、40件绘画、拼贴和多件行为作品，展览脉络十分清晰：从徐震1990年代末的早期个人创作，到2009年创立没顶公司之后的集体身份创作，再到2013年没顶公司推出品牌“徐震”并发布一系列重要新作。
展览标题“徐震：没顶公司出品”揭示了长期以来徐震的个人实践和他所根植的上海当代艺术圈之间的关系。自2009年开始，徐震将个人的艺术创作绑定在“生产当代艺术”的没顶公司名下，作为公司老板继续策划项目、制造作品并以集体的名义参加展览。没顶公司体现了徐震的独一无二之处：将艺术实践、策划和推广融于一身，综合构造了其多元化的艺术生涯和在上海艺术领域的特殊地位。这种消解自我角色的创作方式是对当代艺术体系中的身份政治的反叛，自1997年徐震开始艺术创作至今，他的作品一直是集体力量的产物。
馆长田霏宇认为，“自新世纪之初，徐震在怀疑、行动、思考和不断实践中形成独特的体系，造就了中国当代艺术迄今最具说服力和自省精神的一系列作品。我们期待向更多尚未熟知这位杰出艺术家的观众们介绍和展示他的重要创作。”
徐震以其惯有的嘲讽姿态介入庞杂多变的论题，近似于伊夫·克莱因式的恶作剧：从《看见自己的眼睛：中东当代艺术展》(一个充斥着虚构的中东艺术家作品的“群展”) 中的跨文化政治和国际视角，到《饥饿的苏丹》(在展厅内原样重现了凯文·卡特摄于1994年的同名代表作) 中的关于种族和苦难的窥私癖与道德焦虑，再到《8848-1.86》(徐震“锯掉”了等同自己身高的珠穆朗玛峰顶，并运到美术馆参加展览) 对当代艺术系统的游戏规则的调侃。综合来看，徐震的艺术实践反映了艺术家个体对于国际当代艺术系统和游戏规则的持续关注及深刻质疑，而“中国当代艺术”这一标签是最直接的例证。徐震反复地探测那些侵蚀观者的视觉经验的中介物，尤其当对象是异质文化时所产生的转译问题。
“徐震：没顶公司出品”将呈现他的一系列代表作品，包括创作于1998年的录像《喊》，徐震在拥挤的城市街头突发性地喊叫，只是为了捕捉数百名路人在瞬间的惊望回头和各种反应，这件作品使他成为迄今为止参加威尼斯双年展主题展的最年轻的中国艺术家。2007年的装置《香格纳超市》则按照原比例在迈阿密巴塞尔艺术博览会的现场复制了一个上海便利商店，货架上摆满了被抽空的包装、标价售卖的只是徒有其表的外壳，在艺术市场泡沫即将破灭的当时引发了大规模的争辩。在2013的新作《意识形状博物馆》中，徐震以一系列社会、宗教和政治的规准去陈列考古学及人类学文物——实际上只是摆放同样的照片——对地点或时间的起源则毫无尊重。
UCCA的大堂亦将呈现本展的一件重要新作，徐震在字面上将“东方”和“西方”简单粗暴地并置——对于数量庞大的中国艺术来说是最正确的陈词滥调——将无头的希腊风格和佛教的典型化塑像颈对颈地组装在一起。
展览由UCCA与没顶公司联合打造。同期出版画册《徐震：没顶公司出品》，亦是徐震迄今为止第一本综合性的作品集，收录有田霏宇和鲁明军的评论文章。展览期间，徐震还将作为由田霏宇策划的第16届军械库艺术展 (2014年3月5日 – 3月 9日)“聚焦：中国”展区的委任艺术家，为博览会现场打造独特的视觉呈现。
A major mid-career retrospective explores the protean Shanghai artist’s interest in geopolitical subjectivity and the conditions of (Chinese) contemporary art.
UCCA is proud to announce a major mid-career survey of mercurial Chinese artist Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai), one of the most interesting and promising artists working in China today. An irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen is a key figure in the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1980. The exhibition is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari and UCCA Chief Curator Paula Tsai.
Xu Zhen’s practice incorporates a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, mechanical installation, video, photography, and performance, often within a single piece. “Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production” comprises a similarly diverse set of works, with over 50 installation pieces, 10 videos, 40 painting and collage works, and several performances, filling UCCA’s signature Great Hall. The exhibition spans Xu Zhen’s early works made in his own name beginning in 1997, works made under the moniker MadeIn Company between 2009 and 2013, as well as significant new pieces produced specially for this exhibition under MadeIn Company’s “Xu Zhen” brand.
The title “Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production” acknowledges the longstanding relationship between the artist’s individual practice and his sprawling involvement with the Shanghai contemporary art scene. In 2009, Xu Zhen dissolved his art practice into the “contemporary art creation company” MadeIn Company. Acting as the group’s CEO, Xu Zhen continues to undertake creative projects, artworks, and exhibitions under this revised mantle. MadeIn encapsulates Xu Zhen’s unique conflation of art practice, curatorial work, and art promotion that has defined his multifarious career in the Shanghai art scene. The artist’s withdrawal from his own name marks a rejection of the persona-driven contemporary art world while acknowledging that, since he first began working with art in 1997, Xu Zhen’s artwork has always been a collaborative effort.
Says Tinari, “Since the early 2000s, Xu Zhen, with his unique combination of skepticism and action, contemplation and involvement, has produced some of the most compelling and self-knowing art contemporary China has ever seen. We look forward to presenting his considerable output to audiences who might not yet be familiar with the arc of his career.”
A prankster provocateur in the vein of Yves Klein, Xu Zhen engages a variety issues with his characteristic wryness, from the politics of intercultural and international viewing in Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Middle East Contemporary Art (a “group show” of works by fictional Middle Eastern artists), to voyeurism and ethical anxiety in depictions of race and suffering in The Starving of Sudan (an in-gallery tableau recreating Kevin Carter’s iconic 1994 photograph of a starving infant), to satire of de rigeur contemporary art practices in 8848-1.86 (wherein the artist “removes” a chunk of Mount Everest equivalent to his own height from the summit and brings it back for display in the museum). Presented together, Xu Zhen’s oeuvre reflects the lingering concerns of an artist participating in the international art world while remaining deeply skeptical of it and its conventions, most immediately the label “Chinese contemporary art.” Xu Zhen’s artworks probe the various mediations that corrupt the viewer’s experience of an artwork, particularly in observing a culture that is not one’s own.
“Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production” includes a number of Xu Zhen’s landmark works. His 1998 video Shouting, in which the artist lets out pained shouts on crowded city streets, only to capture the sequential shock and dismissal of hundreds of passers-by, made him the youngest Chinese artist to date to be included in the Venice Biennale. His 2007 installation Shanghart Supermarket, which takes the shape of a Shanghai convenience store fully stocked with packaging that has been emptied of content, sold for the price of the putative objects, was widely debated when it debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach at the height of the last art-market bubble. In Physique of Consciousness Museum, Xu Zhen uses various social, religious, and political criteria to array archaeological and ethnographic artifacts—actually just mounted photographs of the same—without respect to place or time of origin.
In a major new commission for the lobby, Xu Zhen literally and winkingly juxtaposes East and West—that operative cliché of so much art in China—by mounting headless replicas of key Hellenistic and Buddhist sculptures neck to neck.
The UCCA exhibition is realized in collaboration with MadeIn Company. It is accompanied by an eponymous catalogue which will mark the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, with essays by Philip Tinari and Lu Mingjun. The exhibition will coincide with The Armory Show 2014 (March 5-9), for which Xu Zhen has been appointed the Commissioned Artist as part of the “Armory Focus: China” section which Tinari has curated.
