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| Chen Zhen's Crystal Landscape of Inner Body |
Francois Pinault’s Punta della Dogana gallery in Venice has just opened ‘In Praise of Doubt,’ a presentation of historical pieces and new works including several site-specific projects that question the idea of uncertainty, our convictions about identity, and revisit the relationship between intimate space and the space of artwork. Among the twenty artists featured, two are from Asia: Chen Zhen and Subodh Gupta.
Born in Shanghai, Chen Zhen (1955-2000) emigrated to New York in 1986 and then moved to Paris where he studied fine arts. He later abandoned painting for installation, giving new life to everyday objects he had rescued from oblivion. He was particularly interested in reviving the memory of the traditional knowledge (philosophy, literature and medicine) then banned in China. By mingling aspects of this culture with elements more closely related to the Western practice of contemporary art, he was one of the first artists to explore multiculturalism. Suffering from leukemia from the age of 25, the artist explored in his works the difference between the Eastern and Western approach to medicine; this resulted in a number of works dealing with the care and treatment of the human body, where the body is viewed as an interior landscape. Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000, made shortly before the artist’s death, is a representation in crystal of eleven organs of the human body resting on a hospital bed. The work evokes the frailty and transience of life, and through the interplay of reflections it presents a meditation on the relation between the inner and outer world, individual and society, material and spiritual universe. A philosophical inquiry related to the concept of emptiness in Zen Buddhism is the source of Cocon du vide’ 2000 (“Empty Cocoon”), an assemblage consisting of Buddhist rosaries (religion), wooden Chinese abacuses (mathematics), and brass bells (everyday life).
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| Subodh Gupta's Et tu, Duchamp? |
Indian artist Subodh Gupta (b 1964) has made a name for himself also assembling everyday stainless steel objects, cooking pots, pails and pans to discuss the complexity of socio-economic and cultural life in India today. This exhibition presents several pieces from the artist, including
Spooning (2009), a work consisting of two stainless steel spoons over 2.5 meters long, resting on the floor like a couple of lovers, and the sculpture
Et tu, Duchamp? (2009), a three-dimensional bronze reworking of the French artist’s mustachioed Mona Lisa entitled LH.O.O.Q. (1919), paying explicit homage to his predecessor.
