Chen Zhen - Silence Sonore

In autumn 2003, the Palais de Tokyo, a site for contemporary art, will present the first major show at a Parisian institution devoted exclusively to the Chinese artist Chen Zhen, who died prematurely in 2000.

A true homage to an artist who exhibited in the greatest international venues during his lifetime, the show will bring together a brilliant collection of major works created in the 1990s that are representative of the extraordinary variety and depth of the Zhen's output.

Born in Shanghai in 1955 to a family of doctors-six years after the founding of the People's Republic of China-Chen Zhen eventually left his country after studying fine arts and set design there. He settled in Paris in 1986 and entered the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts (France's national advanced school of fine arts). This East-West cultural migration, and the change of socio-political regimes from a collectivist communist system to an individualist capitalist one, was to prove one of the powerful foundations of Zhen's thinking and inspiration as an artist. In 1987, he learned he had an incurable form of anemia. This illness and his family's interest in medicine were to open up a new field of inquiry for the artist.

The show "Silence Sonore" aims to present different aspects of Zhen's approach to art, which was fueled by both a continuous migration between different geographic and cultural territories, and the artist's reflection on the context that surrounds the production of a work of art, taking into account social, historic and political givens… The exhibition will bring together monumental pieces as well as series of the artist's drawings. Zhen introduced a form of thought that lends a spiritual dimension to his work and situates humans at the very heart of his concerns, while granting real importance to the experience and local context of a show.

Three major lines of development help to structure "Silence Sonore":

- human beings' connections with objects and nature, principally seen in pieces like "Precipitous Parturition" (1999), "Fu Dao/Fu Dao, Upside-down Buddha/Arrival a Good Fortune" (1997), or "Field of Synergy" (1995); these works offer a critique of a materialist world and the systems of consumption as dominant models;

- the misunderstanding between humans and the theme of reconciliation, leitmotifs that run through such works as "The Voice Of Migrators" 1995, "Jue Chang-Fifty Strokes to Each" (1998), and "Autel de lumière" (Altar of Light-2000); these pieces are situated in the field of political critique;

- and finally, meditation and therapy, which lie at the heart of his work; "Lumière Innocente" (2000), "Jue Chang (the last song)-Dancing Body/Drumming Mind" (2000) and "Obsession of Longevity" (1995) question the relationship between the doctor, the patient and his disease. Zhen actually began the project of becoming a Chinese doctor and medical activity thus became a form of philosophical and artistic investigation. By claiming "to be concerned with diagnosing the illnesses of the world," "to want to reconcile humans and the world," and "to do things with a therapeutic sense (for the public)," Zhen sees the artist as a therapist for himself and more globally society. This is surely one of the strong points of his activity as an artist, which the Palais de Tokyo is especially eager to bring to light in this exhibition.

Zhen's overall view of the world allows for an approach to art that runs counter to an art system in the West deemed to be overly conceptual and therefore detached from reality.

In his lifetime, Chen Zhen exhibited in numerous international institutions, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1994; the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan, 1997; 1998; the Venice Biennale, 1999; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Gam, Turin, 2000 ; PS1, New York, 2003 ; CCC in Tours, 2003 ; and PAC, Milan, 2003. Pressetext

Chen Zhen - Silence Sonore