DSL Collection

"A Minibus, like hundreds of thousands cruising all over China, topped with the distinct blue-white-red striped plastic bags, which are even more omnipresent than the bus, with the slight difference that the interior of the bus has been converted into a huge washing machine complete with external water supply system.
By calling this installation Comfortable the artists exercises no small amount of the ironic - and sometimes cruel - humour he is known for. Connecting countryside with city and villages with each other these crude small buses, more than any other means of transport, are the workhorses in charge of the displacement of people and goods, which form the basis of China?s economic growth. The three-coloured plastic bags hold a few personal belongings and those innumerable species of goods, which are traded in petty businesses and so build small fortunes for some of the many who never could participate in the glamorous business world of the thriving city centres.

Xu turns these two prominent elements of public life into the private object of a washing machine, then drags them out of their obvious oblivion into the white cube, which is an act of addressing the politically not so opportune as well as connecting with global practices of choosing and presenting art. As one of the organizers of the nearly legendary 1999 Art for Sale show, a short lived attempt to create an appropriate way of dealing with art in Shanghai by exhibiting in a department store, and as co-founder of Bizart centre, Xu Zhen became a leading figure in Shanghai?s progressive art circles. His photography, video and installation work very often comes as performative and mostly is conceptual, with the body - the individual as well as the social one - as a main subject. Xu tackles political content that the Chinese government would prefer to be left unmentioned, such as violence, death and sexuality while remaining below the level of official attention. Rainbow, one of his most well known videos, documents the successive reddening of a human back through beating without actually showing the single hits. By the selective depiction of sheer violence, the work discusses the position of the individual body within Chinese society, but can also be read as a metaphor for the whole Chinese people as a body and as how this body is treated by those who hold the power to do so. The uncomfortable little bus has a thousand-fold daily interaction of its own with the private and - consequently - the public body."
Christof Buettner