Xu Zhen
LONG MARCH SPACE 长征空间
798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District
April 27–June 23
View of “Movement Field,” 2013.
Xu Zhen has reemerged from his art collective MadeIn Company with an audacious latter-day Earthwork. The smell of vegetation alerts the visitor upon entry that this is no ordinary exhibition: Carefully planted rolling knolls with a veritable maze of forking paths have completely taken over the white gallery space. One is reminded less of a traditional Chinese garden of ideal, miniaturized landscapes than a video game remake of Alice in Wonderland with the installation’s bizarre, flat cut-outs of fire, ginseng, and psychedelic bodhisattvas installed throughout the field. Urs Fischer’s intervening excavation of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in You, 2007, comes to mind, as does Gordon Matta-Clark’s various architectural incisions, and even Wang Wei’s Temporary Space from 2003, which included an impenetrably sealed brick house installed in this very space. Yet, here, there is no physical evidence of the rawness intrinsic to these past works.
Or is there? Plotted according to Google Maps, various routes taken by protests and other mass movements are superimposed on top of each other. Visitors are forced to reenact fragments of these demonstrations while being unable to persevere in any one trajectory or know what exactly is being restaged. Included in the randomized imagery that acts as roadblocks are replicas of MadeIn’s previous works, such as last year’s “Movement” sculptures and “Turbulent” action paintings. The exhibition thus not only probes the logic of reproduction in the age of the Internet but also plays on the futility of participation in the ever-growing expanse of open knowledge.