Trapped in a clay coating, everyday objects lie in a room open to view like a theatre stage itself entirely covered in clay: a moped, a helmet and an old computer, a trolley, dishes, furniture, a sofa, a washing machine, a dented suitcase, piles of cables and shoes, empty bottles and hanging clothes…
created in 2000, notably at the Cent Quatre in Paris in 2014 and at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2020.
Petrified, this distillation of our materialistic lives inevitably evokes Pompeii buried under the lava of Vesuvius, but also, as the installation's title indicates, a ritual of purification by earth from Chinese tradition. A fantastic memento mori, this fascinating work was created using found objects and clay by the Franco-Chinese conceptual artist Chen Zhen shortly before his death in 2000. A premonitory tomb for our consumer society suffocated by its own excesses, for our world mired in pollution, which "hastens […] its self-destruction" and heads towards its "irreversible destiny." 1 This “serious monochrome,” to use the artist’s own words, invites us to reflect on our condition. Participating in an “archaeology of the future” (“showing people the objects of today as they will be discovered in the future”), it stems above all from a desire to transform and sublimate used objects destined for a new life (by returning to the earth), destined to be purified in order to “provoke a new destiny”…
1 Quotes taken from Chen Zhen's interviews with Jérôme Sans, conducted in 1992 and published in 2003 by Presses du réel / Palais de Tokyo
“CHEN ZHEN – DOUBLE EXILE”
CONTINUOUS GALLERY
87, RUE DU TEMPLE, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL JANUARY 6, 2024
