The Artist Formerly Known as Xu Zhen
April 9, 2012 in Art Blog, In the News
Risky Business via Artnews
Xu Zhen is MadeIn and MadeIn is Xu Zhen,” says Xu Zhen, 34, the Chinese artist who in 2009 claimed to end his art career and formed a company to produce all future artworks. Sitting in his corporate headquarters, a two-story warehouse in an industrial zone that is a new art district far from the center of Shanghai, Xu Zhen (pronounced Su Jen) seems highly amused by the confusion he has caused. With his long rectangular face punctuated by stylish rectangular eyeglasses, he looks too young to have already accumulated a decade of experience in the Chinese art world. Comparing himself to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he says, “All prestigious companies are known by their founders, not the other way around.”
MadeIn—a spoof on the phrase “Made In China”—has only extended Xu Zhen’s reach and his reputation. In just over two years, MadeIn has shown at ShanghART Gallery, the artist’s longtime dealer; Long March Space in Beijing; and James Cohan Gallery in New York. Last spring, the company had a solo show at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland.
“MadeIn takes the factory idea of Andy Warhol a step further,” says Kunsthalle director Philippe Pirotte. “Xu Zhen’s formation of MadeIn as a company is very conscious and self-reflective about the potential power China now has as a world art-market leader. When the Western world criticizes the Chinese art world as more market than discourse, Xu Zhen answers by saying that the only form of creative collaboration possible in China is a company.” Now, as the head of MadeIn, Xu Zhen directs dozens of employees working in such areas as research and development, artistic production, and archives.
In Bern, MadeIn presented “Physique of Consciousness,” which included photographs, videos, and demonstrations of an exercise routine based on prayer positions from various religions combined with movements from tai chi and martial arts. Pirotte discovered that visitors didn’t know that the exhibition came from China or that Xu Zhen was behind it. In fact, many didn’t realize that this was art at all and assumed that the museum was sponsoring an exercise program.
“The fact that Xu Zhen stopped being Xu Zhen the artist and became the CEO of a company: this would be considered suicide by the art market’s definition of a career,” Pirotte says. “But he took that risk and this has allowed him a kind of freedom.”
Xu Zhen has made a career of pushing boundaries. Born in 1977 in a Shanghai that had not yet developed into a high-rise international city, he attended Shanghai Arts & Crafts Institute as a teenager. When he graduated in 1996, he decided not to continue his education. Instead, he moved to Beijing to be at the center of the new art movements he had heard about.
“I couldn’t see myself spending my life painting from a model in a school,”
Xu Zhen says. He got the idea of going to Beijing after his father, a factory worker and carpenter, read him a news story about the famous Yuanmingyuan artist colony on the outskirts of the city, where artists such as Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun were living. But Xu Zhen never met these already successful characters. Instead, he spent a year hanging out with musicians and poets, talking about art more than making it. By the end of 1997 he had had enough, and he moved back to Shanghai. For the next several years, he, like many of his peers in Shanghai, worked in design companies to earn a living.
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