Chen Shaoxiong

Chen Shaoxiong’s current solo exhibition is titled “Prepared,” and it lasts until September 11. Questions immediately spring to mind: For what has the artist been trying to get prepared? And how? Hou Hanru, the curator, has spoken of art as a way to work against fear in life. Although issues such as terrorism, political upheaval, and economic crisis are present in Chen’s work, it is the feeling of fear, rather than the conditions generating that emotion, that exist at its core. Ink Media, 2013, and Visible and Invisible, Known and Unknown, 2007, point to the way that secondhand realities are fabricated by global image distribution, causing a trepidation both real and unreal to permeate everyday life—a paradoxical state that opens up spaces for the artist to approach his subject in various playful ways. In his video installation Anti-Terrorism Variety, 2002, a skyscraper in Guangzhou is transferred into a cunning living thing, nimbly adjusting its physical form in hundreds of unexpected ways to avoid hostile airplanes that target the building from all directions.

The show also sheds light on how art, as a practice can dissolve the artist’s fear of change, loss, and death—a theme foregrounded in Chen’s latest video installation, The Views, 2016, whose melancholic mood distinguishes it from his earlier works. Though he has explored various techniques, innovation of form is not Chen’s primary concern. There is always a low-tech character in his animation pieces, while the 2012 series “Collective Memory” adopts the plainest form of relational art: The artist invited members of local communities to compose images of neighborhood landmarks with their fingerprints. Instead, Chen sticks to certain kinds of media (ink painting and photography) and conceptual strategies (such as diary writing) over a long period of time. It seems that by turning art into daily routine and keeping traces of everyday life as present as possible in his practice, the artist has managed to live with, though never conquer, his fear of loss and death, for which humans may never be actually prepared. In this sense, the exhibition’s title is less an accurate epithet and more a bitterly sarcastic if elegant one.