Stayed, 7
Chen Zhou’s Solo Show, Hunsand Space, Beijing, China
2019
This exhibition will be his fourth solo project by Chen. He described the exhibition: as a bottle of turbid water with much dust floating in it that has stayed for a long time then it becomes pure and calm. This situation is from the progress of the bottle staying. The artworks that will be shown in this exhibition are those dust in the bottle.
Stayed, 7 will include some videos and installation artworks that have been made by Chen Zhou. All the artworks vaguely point to a situation“stayed”. Two videos will be presented, In Dream and Alive Game, thoughts on life and death of the artist can be seen through these two works. Installation works will be founded by some paintings and ceramic made “Baotaping”（a kind of bottle, its form seems like a pagoda）. Paintings are trying to express a direct feeling of the end of the world and are filled with a feeling of death scientifically, this is the part of “Luox”(falling) in this exhibition. “Bao Ta Ping” was made because of a traditional form of Chinese ceramics called “Hun Ping”(a kind of Chinese traditional ceramic bottle usually buried with dead people and filled with foods); it is a physical object, but conveys metaphysical things. It is because in Buddhism sayings, “Xing Jie You Shi” means that shapes involve spirits on their own. Based on that knowledge, the artist has carved Buddhist scriptures on “Bao Ta Ping” that can also be related to Pagodas; this is the part of “Sheng”(rising) in the exhibition. Chen puts these two parts together to show the understanding of the contemporary world;
Through this exhibition, Chen Zhou firstly directly expresses spirituality. In his past artworks, he mainly worked on explorations of reality, rather from 2009 we can see some expressions from Chen’s comparison between reality and performance in his film works. Until his first feature, Life Imitation (2017), we can more clearly see a process of the artist gradually mentioning spirituality.
