{"id":85,"date":"2020-12-16T06:53:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T06:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/?p=85"},"modified":"2022-11-17T18:13:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T18:13:49","slug":"article-xu-zhen-eternity-vs-evolution-at-the-national-gallery-of-australia-canberra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/zh-hant\/article-xu-zhen-eternity-vs-evolution-at-the-national-gallery-of-australia-canberra\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Xu Zhen: Eternity Vs. Evolution\u2019 at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Alex Burchmore

Dr Alex Burchmore is Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 2013-14 Alex lived in Beijing after receiving a Prime Minister\u2019s Australia Asia Endeavour Postgraduate Award<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exhibitions of Chinese art outside China tend to confirm certain assumptions about the country’s history, culture, politics, and people. At first, \u2018XU ZHEN\u00ae: Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019 at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, seems no exception to this rule, promising viewers a proven combination of two enduring preconceptions about China\u2019s past and present. On one hand, the \u2018Eternity\u2019 of the title evokes fantasies of a civilization distinguished not only by antiquity but by an apparently unbroken lineage of cultural florescence, inspiring flights of fantastical chinoiserie<\/em> as well as stereotypes of Oriental despotism and stasis. ‘Evolution’, on the other hand, evokes the ceaseless metamorphoses that have come to define contemporary China for many of those who have made a career of watching the country’s transformation from afar. In the eyes of these \u2018China Hawks\u2019, those who rule the People\u2019s Republic have betrayed an ancestral birthright in their relentless pursuit of profit, degrading the environment in the name of industrial advancement, denying human rights to those disenfranchised by their rule, and destroying architectural and material heritage in their efforts to remould the face of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae
Shouting (stills) 2009
single-channel video, sound, duration 3:42
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019 could be compared in its juxtaposition of these assumptions with the comparable pairing of ossified antiquity in \u2018Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality\u2019 and contemporary metamorphosis in \u2018Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape\u2019 at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, in 2019. In contrast to the artefacts of China’s early imperial rulers showcased in \u2018Guardians of Immortality\u2019, however, remnants of classical civilization on display in \u2018Eternity Vs. Evolution\u2019 are visibly artificial, culturally ambiguous, and irredeemably compromised by the artist’s creative manipulations or distortions of history. In Melbourne, the First Emperor\u2019s sentinels and the \u2018gunpowder-paintings\u2019 of one of China\u2019s most renowned contemporary artists were shown in proximity but remained self-contained. In Canberra, no such separation has been enforced. Present and past are inextricably combined in Xu\u2019s intentionally contradictory and confounding installations, paintings, textiles, and mixed-media assemblages. Additionally, while \u2018Guardians of Immortality\u2019 grew from an ongoing partnership with a provincial arm of the Chinese government, and \u2018Transient Landscape\u2019 comprised a series of commissions from Cai Guo-Qiang himself, \u2018Eternity Vs. Evolution\u2019 has been drawn almost entirely from the collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney. As such, a closer comparison could be drawn with \u2018A Fairy Tale in Red Times: Works from the White Rabbit Collection\u2019, also at the NGV in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his analysis of the role that White Rabbit has played in mediating Chinese culture for Australian audiences since opening in 2009, David Bell attributes the gallery\u2019s success to its \u2018accommodation of the challenging, discomfiting, and dislocating.\u2019 White Rabbit\u2019s exhibitions have become known for their strategic use of \u2018shock, humour, gaudiness, or subtlety [to] transport viewers beyond their \u2026 comfort zones,\u2019 compelling a reassessment of assumptions derived from prejudice or preconception and thereby challenging the frequently clich\u00e9d representations of contemporary China found elsewhere. The gallery has been greatly enabled in this mission, Bell explains, by its independence from conventional sources of patronage in the Australian arts community as a not-for-profit charity financed entirely by founder Judith Neilson, whose appetite for Chinese art has been guided since her first purchase in 1999 by a taste for the provocative.(1) Neilson\u2019s fortune and the formidable size of her collection, now estimated to contain over 2000 works by almost 700 artists, have also allowed the gallery to avoid cooperation with state-owned arts institutions and therefore to openly critique government agendas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae
Dah\u2026Dah\u2026Dah\u2026Dah\u2026 2009 (ed. 1\/5)
steel
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney \u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae
In Progress #180×131 2012
plywood, inlaid wood veneers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, while challenging prejudice and preconception, the works represented in Neilson\u2019s collection can also serve to confirm other prevailing assumptions about the art of contemporary China. Their frequently controversial or subversive content, for example, supports a view of such art as an inevitably oppositional statement on adverse socio-cultural and political conditions. This is especially true when these works are shown, as at the NGV, alongside artefacts of a past China \u2013 many visitors to the gallery in 2019 may have found their assumptions confirmed as they moved from the promise of \u2018Eternity\u2019 in the display of Terracotta Warriors on the ground floor, to the visions of contemporary \u2018Evolution\u2019 furnished by White Rabbit on the top floor. \u2018A Fairy Tale in Red Times\u2019 also illustrates the extent to which the transposition of Neilson\u2019s ambitions to a state institution presents curators with something of a double bind. It is perhaps inevitable that some of the transgressive potential of her collection is lost, while works deemed too controversial or inflammatory are rarely shown beyond White Rabbit\u2019s walls. Yet institutional affiliation also has its advantages, foremost among which are the benefits of increased space, a larger install team, and a broader audience. The challenge for exhibitions like \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019 and \u2018A Fairy Tale in Red Times\u2019 therefore lies in the need to strike a balance between these competing objectives: to cultivate blockbuster appeal while overturning convention and stereotype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae
Immortals\u2019 Trails in Secret Land 2012
real and synthetic fabric, leather, feathers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae
Spread b-041 2010
synthetic fabrics, cotton, faux fur
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Entering \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019 from the NGA\u2019s Asian Art galleries, visitors are introduced to (or initiated into) the exhibition with \u2018Rainbow\u2019<\/em> (1998), one of two videos that stand as representative expressions of the first of three phases in Xu Zhen\u2019s career. Philip Tinari, art historian and director of Beijing\u2019s UCCA, has identified Xu\u2019s work of the 1990s as a product of \u2018the tail end of the underground era\u2019 in Chinese art, when \u2018a sense that art could challenge \u2026 mainstream values\u2019 remained possible.(2) The four-minute video shows the exposed back of an anonymous performer against a stark white background that accentuates the gradual reddening of skin when struck repeatedly by an unknown assailant, the impact of an open hand heard but not seen. No context or reason is given for these blows, yet the immobility of the performer suggests complicity and implies that what seems to denote punishment, torture, or abuse may signify the fulfilment of a masochistic pleasure or a playful test of endurance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The choice of this as the opening work for the exhibition is equally ambiguous. On one hand, it could be a rite of passage, a transformative shedding of the self through ritualised exposure to pain that simultaneously initiates the performer into a heightened awareness. On the other hand, it could merely be a display of bravado, a time-honoured hazing that must be endured to join a secretive and hedonistic fraternity. This blending of slapstick and sincerity reappears in \u2018Shouting\u2019<\/em> (1998) in the first gallery, the second video representing this phase in Xu\u2019s career. In this work, rather than a voyeuristic observer, we take the cameraman\u2019s perspective, sharing his mirth as the crowds occupying the lens turn around in surprise at the sound of his repeated exclamations, quickening their steps as they return to their aims. The NGA\u2019s caption explains Xu\u2019s screams as \u2018a way of asserting his individuality in a society that prioritises community and conformity,\u2019 enlisting the work as a combatant in the struggle of democratic values against authoritarianism that many critics outside China identify as the primary content of the country\u2019s art.(3) Like \u2018Rainbow\u2019<\/em>, however, \u2018Shouting\u2019<\/em> might also represent little more than an expression of youthful exuberance, a prank or dare between friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the context of the exhibition, these works introduce a theme of noise, alternately contained and released, that also appears in \u2018Calm\u2019, \u2018You\u2019re Going to Heaven Tomorrow\u2019,and\u2018Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026\u2019<\/em> (all 2009), installed opposite \u2018Shouting\u2019. Rather than human cries of pain (or pleasure) and excitement (or anxiety), these works embody the aftermath of what we are led to believe would have been deafening blasts of rhetoric and explosive detonation, made eerily silent by entombment within mute metal and rock. The caption for \u2018Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026\u2019 and \u2018You\u2019re Going to Heaven Tomorrow\u2019 identifies these jagged sheets of corroded steel as material records of gunfire and \u2018the soundwaves of a speech made by a politician or terrorist \u2026 a visible echo of the violent reality that those words can create.\u2019 Yet the onomatopoeic title of the former is a deliberate misnomer, likely intended to heighten this sense of violence \u2013 both pieces are \u2018voice-graphs\u2019 taken from political figures associated with conflict in the Middle East.(4) \u2018Calm\u2019, a mass of twisted metal and stone on the gallery floor, also invites association with conflict, recalling the ruins that war inevitably leaves in its wake. In contrast to the lifelessness of the latter, however, the almost imperceptible, undulating motion of a concealed waterbed imparts Xu\u2019s wreckage with a tenuous vitality marked by the rasp of stone against stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solemn dignity of these conflict-laden works may seem antithetical to the sardonic abandon of \u2018Shouting\u2019, despite a shared emphasis on the containment of sound. Yet their apparent sincerity and ideological rigour, like that of the earlier video, is not as straightforward as it seems. As some of the earliest products of MadeIn Company, an \u2018art corporation\u2019 that Xu founded in 2009, these works also stand as representatives of a second distinct phase in his career. The trading name of this corporate entity is a nod to the ubiquitous label \u2018Made in China\u2019 stamped on mass-produced commodities across the world \u2013 an ironic statement, perhaps, on the quantity of contemporary art from China saturating the market when Xu decided to incorporate. The Chinese transliteration for this term, on the other hand \u2013 meiding<\/em> (\u6ca1\u9876), meaning \u2018without a head\u2019 or \u2018without limit\u2019 \u2013 implies both \u2018[a] submersion of the ego and individuality \u2026 a sacrifice of the self in favour of the final product,\u2019 and the infinite extension of this production ad nauseam<\/em>.(5) The transformation of his independent artistic practice into a corporate endeavour therefore allowed Xu to disguise his personal investment in the process of creation while at the same time multiplying the range of identities that the products of this process could represent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture 2014 (ed. 2\/3)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This capacity for masquerade and multiple identity found clear expression in MadeIn\u2019s inaugural exhibition, \u2018Seeing One\u2019s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East\u2019 (2009), for which \u2018Calm\u2019, \u2018Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026\u2019, and \u2018You\u2019re Going to Heaven Tomorrow\u2019were created. The central conceit of this exhibition, as the title indicates, was the misleading assertion that works included had been created by young Middle Eastern artists with the intention of \u2018dissolving any monolithic views\u2019 about the art of this region and assembling \u2018a representative \u2013 if never comprehensive \u2013 sample of what Middle Eastern art wants to be about today.\u2019(6) Those who visited the show found a range of stereotypical motifs on display, from chadors and mosques to oil derricks and razor wire, \u2018generically evocative forms spiced with enough ethnic detail to make their consumption feel like a border crossing, albeit a very smooth one.\u2019(7) The aim, as the accompanying text makes clear, was to \u2018provoke the viewer to think about issues of cultural perception\u2019 and to expose \u2018the tendency of the West to create a neat package for art from other cultures.\u2019(8) Hence the apparently missing preposition: we are not expected to see with<\/em> our own eyes, drawing back the veil to bear witness to the unadorned truth, but to recognise that our vision is always already compromised by prejudice and preconception \u2013 we see what we want to see. Impartiality is an impossibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those unfamiliar with Xu\u2019s artistic career, this subtext in \u2018Calm\u2019, \u2018Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026 Dah\u2026\u2019, and \u2018You\u2019re Going to Heaven Tomorrow\u2019 is not immediately apparent in \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019. A clue to their contrived exoticism is provided, however, by the inclusion of \u2018In Progress #180×131\u2019 (2012), a Persian rug recreated in plywood that both confirms the Middle Eastern theme while exposing its fabrication. The implied substitution of soft woollen fibres for a more inflexible medium also draws attention to another unifying theme in the exhibition: an attention to material contrasts. This is evident as well in the combination of masonry and silicon rubber in \u2018Calm\u2019, but especially in the pairing of the steel \u2018voice-graphs\u2019 with \u2018Under Heaven 20121018\u2019 (2012) and \u2018Under Heaven \u2013 Black Light 0302VS0137\u2019 (2013). Xu (or rather his staff at MadeIn) created these and other works in the \u2018Under Heaven\u2019series by using a chef\u2019s piping bag to apply oil paint in icing-like swirls and daubs so thick that they can take months to dry and must be rotated when hung to prevent slumping. The visceral effect of this application has been diminished at the NGA by their display behind glass in a poorly lit corner of the gallery, preventing a full appreciation of their three-dimensionality. Nevertheless, the contrast of voluptuous excess and unyielding rigidity created by their juxtaposition with the other works in the room remains in evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The material contrasts continue in the third gallery, in which sculptural and textile works of monumental proportions imbue the recurring tension between hard and soft with an air of faded luxury. The excess of the \u2018Under Heaven\u2019 canvases finds an echo here in the visually and materially ostentatious tapestries \u2018Spread B-041\u2019 (2010) and \u2018Immortals\u2019 Trails in Secret Land\u2019 (2012). The former is a variation on a series first shown in \u2018Seeing One\u2019s Own Eyes\u2019 in which European and North American caricatures of Middle Eastern politics are combined in feverish collages of fear, hatred, and prejudice. The eclectic cast of characters populating this tapestry, on the other hand, are drawn from popular cartoons and animated series, their garish and crudely embroidered forms overlaid to the point of illegibility. \u2018Immortals\u2019 Trails in Secret Land\u2019 is equally unintelligible, juxtaposing a haphazard assortment of figures, motifs, and symbolic objects drawn from various cultures with marine animals, birds, and a writhing serpent. The spectacle and inscrutability of both works are heightened by their installation above eye-level and their overwhelming scale, enticing the viewer to search for some key to unlock the mystery of their composition, only to discover that this mystery lies entirely in their resistance to any attempt at understanding. There are no complex allegories here waiting to be uncovered by a worthy initiate, only an absurd and vacuous palimpsest calculated to mislead and deceive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"XU<\/a>
XU ZHEN\u00ae: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The same fusion of vacuity and spectacle animates the final three works in \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019, imposing sculptural assemblages that dominate both the exhibition design and branding. These works exemplify a third phase in Xu\u2019s career, created following the inauguration in 2013 of his XUZHEN\u2122 brand among MadeIn\u2019s growing range of art-products. For Monika Szewczyk, this most recent self-commodification signals a final metamorphosis of the individual into the corporation, \u2018[devoid of] biography, personhood, or personality [yet acting] as a kind of super-subjectivity.\u2019(9) David Elliott has identified a resemblance between this super-subjectivity and the incarnations of Daoist and Buddhist deities, the diversity of which both embodies and obscures the multiplicity of the divine.(10) Once again, Xu is demonstrating his capacity for infinite transformation \u2013 with Walt Whitman, he celebrates the ambiguities of his artistic practice: \u2018Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).\u2019(11) Characteristically, however, the artist himself has dismissed his self-branding as little more than another stage in MadeIn\u2019s development as a business, driven by market demand: \u2018Over the years we have found that people want a person to focus on rather than a group.\u2019(12)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The three monumental sculptural works included in \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019, marketed under the XUZHEN\u2122 brand, exemplify this apparently contradictory combination of the divine and prosaic. \u2018European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture\u2019 (2014), when viewed head-on, conjures an illusion of unity \u2013 or perhaps of super-subjectivity \u2013 in which a procession of sculptural icons embodying European and North American deities or allegorical figures are incorporated into a composite facsimile of Guanyin, the thousand-armed bodhisattva<\/em> of compassion. The unity of this figure immediately dissolves, however, as soon as the viewer moves around the sculpture and discovers the fractured artificiality of its construction, a material echo of those equally fragile and contrived dreams of geopolitical harmony or universal syncretism of belief to which so many idealists have dedicated their lives. \u2018Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment\u2019 (2013-14) embodies another fusion of \u2018East\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019 in the decapitation and reassembly of sculptural icons standing in for classical Greece and China, inexplicably fused at the neck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These works appear, at first, to confirm the conventional separation of these regions as distinct spheres of cultural development, home to diametrically opposed forms of religious and political civic life. Xu\u2019s use of the Parthenon pediment as a sole support for the inverted Buddhist figures in \u2018Eternity\u2019 can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the enduring association of the West with a grounded materialism and the East with groundless spiritual fantasies. Yet in the context of Xu\u2019s broader artistic practice, and especially in conjunction with the other works in \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019, their fusion of sculptural vocabularies speaks instead to his desire to transform material artefacts of the past into \u2018information objects\u2019 or carriers of coded \u2018cultural genes\u2019. When shown in unison, Xu explains, \u2018their relationship seems very natural, as if they were meant to be together \u2026 re-determined and re-combined.\u2019(13) Speaking with Philip Tinari in 2015, he associated this recombination with a breakdown of singular cultural identification in the post-internet era, to the extent that \u2018it becomes \u2026 difficult to distinguish who made which work, or \u2026 if a work was made by a Chinese or a foreign artist.\u2019(14) Ornamented with these ambivalent icons of transcultural (con)fusion, the Brutalist architectural void of the NGA\u2019s galleries takes on the universalizing proportions of a conqueror\u2019s vault, where trophies of the vanquished jostle for attention, stripped of all previous meaning and specificity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keeping watch over this motley hoard, the voluptuous coils of \u2018\u201cHello\u201d\u2019 (2019) take pride of place in \u2018Eternity Vs Evolution\u2019, towering over the viewer and following their every move with a baleful gaze that threatens consumption by the emptiness of the void (and note the inclusion of quotation marks in the title). The caption for this work draws attention to the historic prestige of the Corinthian column that Xu has chosen for the body of his serpent, \u2018first created in ancient Greece [as] a symbol of power, prestige and western civilization.\u2019 Yet the flaccid immobility of this automated guardian, save for the hesitant and creaking sway of its pediment-head when activated by the approach of the viewer, inspires more pity than dread. Carved in soft and yielding Styrofoam, this is a column devoid of all function, a structural support incapable of supporting its own weight, spectacular in scale but hollow within. As such, \u2018\u201cHello\u201d\u2019 offers a clue to the underlying message of the exhibition: that which seems invulnerable and eternal is often little more than an artfully contrived illusion, while the evidence of our own eyes is rarely as straightforward as it seems and inevitably colored by the assumptions that structure our view of the world. The eager insistence with which Xu\u2019s column forces viewers to look upon its hollow face seems to mark an impatient desire for us to join in the joke \u2013 to realize that the spectacle of this exhibition and the archetypal narratives of Chinese eternity and evolution on which this spectacle rests are contrived, reductive, and devoid of substance. The responsibility for this realization remains, however, as always in Xu\u2019s work, on our personal commitment to the questioning of our most cherished values and our readiness to admit that we are all complicit in the upholding of certain stereotypes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alex Burchmore<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex<\/a>
Alex Burchmore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  1. David Bell, \u2018White Rabbit, Contemporary Chinese Artists and Soft Power in Sydney\u2019s Chippendale,\u2019 in China in Australasia: Cultural Diplomacy and Chinese Arts Since the Cold War<\/em>, edited by James Beattie, Richard Bullen, and Maria Galikowski (New York: Routledge, 2019), 136-40.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Philip Tinari, \u2018Moving in a Bigger Direction,\u2019 Parkett<\/em>, no. 96 (2015): 149.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. In this respect, it seems telling, that both works were chosen to feature in the Venice Biennale \u2013 \u2018Rainbow\u2019 in the 49th<\/sup> Biennale in 2001 and \u2018Shouting\u2019 in the 51st<\/sup> Biennale in 2005 \u2013 where they would undoubtedly have served to reinforce such assumptions for many viewers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Chris Moore, \u2018Chris Moore on MADEIN at ShanghART, Shanghai,\u2019 in MadeIn, Seeing One\u2019s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East<\/em> (Shanghai: ShanghART Gallery, 2009), unpaginated.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. Travis Jeppesen, \u2018Art, Inc. Shanghai,\u2019 Art in America<\/em> (April 2013): 91.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. MadeIn, Seeing One\u2019s Own Eyes<\/em>, unpaginated.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Monika Szewczyk, \u2018MadeIn Heaven,\u2019 Parkett<\/em>, no. 96 (2015): 164-5.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. MadeIn, Seeing One\u2019s Own Eyes<\/em>, unpaginated.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. Szewczyk, \u2018MadeIn Heaven,\u2019 166.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. David Elliott, \u2018In the Face of History: Chaos and Rectitude in the Work of Xu Zhen,\u2019 in Xu Zhen<\/em>, edited by Chris Moore (Berlin: Distanz, 2014), 35.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  11. This line appears in Whitman\u2019s magnum opus<\/em>,\u2018Song of Myself\u2019, first published in Leaves of Grass<\/em> (1855).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  12. Xu Zhen, cited in Michael Young, \u2018Where I Work: Xu Zhen,\u2019 Art Asia Pacific<\/em>, no. 88 (May\/June 2014): 185.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  13. Xu Zhen, in Rajesh Punj, \u2018Information Age: A Conversation with Xu Zhen,\u2019 Sculpture<\/em> 37, no. 3 (April 2018): 27-31.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  14. Xu Zhen, in Tinari, \u2018Moving in a Bigger Direction,\u2019 154-5.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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