The Mirror Will Soon Disappear from the World, Chapter I, The Illusion in the Mirror Makes Me Hardly See the Mirror

Chen Zhou's Solo Show in Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai, China

2020

Cc Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of The mirror will soon disappear from the world, an exhibition by artist Chen Zhou, on Saturday, April 18, 2020, from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm.

Beginning with the video installation “I’m not not not Chen Zhou,” (2013, HD 1080P, 34 minutes) and concluding with the site-specific installation/performance “The illusion in the mirror makes me hardly see the mirror” (2020, stage, performance, mask, mirror, mural painting, dimensions variable), the exhibition employs multiple vocabularies, such as color field painting, moving images, installation, and live performance, to explore the dialectic entanglement of self-identity and self-reflection.

With slight satire, situated in a bright lemon yellow room, a monitor displays “I’m not not not Chen Zhou,” which oscillates between a series of colloquies delivered by two twin actors, monologues by a lone madman, and the artist’s voiceover. The speeches that are derived from actual conversations between the artist and his close friends (Li Ming, Li Ran, Yu Honglei, etc.) disclose fragments of the artist’s character, guiding the viewer to piece together his identity, which, however, is complicated by the performance of the twins---surrogates of Chen’s alter ego, evoking the viewer’s personal retrospection.

In the middle of the room, the artist intentionally teases out absurdity and uncertainty with a chalk figure on the floor, resembling a crime scene, and a comic book titled My Favorite Jokes next to it, underlining indescribable senses of both insipidity and unease. Although in comparison to his more recent work that closely indexes the mundane everydayness, the 2013 video is fraught with theatricality and sentimentality; it nevertheless marked the inception of the artist’s journey of interrogating the notion of self-identity, which more or less has caused his own stress and agony.

A blue rectangular in the size of a commonly seen canvas with a mirror hung backward on it is painted on the wall in the middle section of the room. The shift from yellow to blue transforms the space from dramatic to meditative. “To me, blue no longer represents a color but a space of tranquility. I used to favor yellow---a bright and joyful color. At the time, I just embarked on Zenism, which made me out of control, and I enjoyed being out of control. In retrospect, I overestimated myself.”

Glancing over the blue rectangular, the viewer finds a red stage at the end of the room. The artist will sit on it at the opening performing live for the first time. “I’ll sit there wearing a mask and looking into a mirror in my hand. There will be no holes on the mask, therefore I can’t actually see the mirror. But I’ll nevertheless hold the mirror in front of my face for three hours.”

A colossal, shattered mirror is on the wall behind the red stage as if an inaudible voice were murmuring in the space, “Nothing is indestructible.” Taking into account the intercontextuality between film and space, the artist also addresses his personal belief and experience in relation to the tumultuous external world. Re-contextualizing his old work with the new one and juxtaposing emotionally charged colors in the space, Chen Zhou ushers the viewer into a conceptual realm, where reality is distorted by the broken mirror.