“Great works are something you discover, not something you create. I feel I would be limited in what I could discover if I were working on my own.”—Xu Zhen
“Corporation” led by Xu Zhen, born Shanghai, 1977
The artist Xu Zhen set up MadeIn after deciding he had taken his individual identity as far as it would go. Posing as a kind of advertising agency, the Shanghai-based group aims to upset the assumptions of the art establishment in ways both theatrical and humorous. Under Heaven 20121018 (2012) is a lavishly overdecorated cake-canvas, smothered with thick blobs of paint squeezed directly from an icing bag. The technique arose from playful experiment, but the swirling pattern suggests cityscapes and landscapes seen from the perspective of the gods. Calm (2009) was part of an exhibition that purported to show works by unnamed Middle Eastern artists; in fact all the works were made by MadeIn with the goal of exposing the filters of prejudice through which one culture views another. As Xu Zhen notes, “The West mainly associates the Middle East with death and violence, human suffering and a continuing political and religious deadlock.” A pile of rubble conforms perfectly with the conventional image of the region as a place of random bombings and IEDs. But this rubble moves, gently undulating as if breathing—a reminder that people can be buried by clichés as well as by explosions. Spread B-041 (2010) is a fifteen-square-metre collage of cloth, thread and other materials that deconstructs and reassembles imagery from magazines, newspapers, cartoons and comics. Xu Zhen says the Spread series “uses media as a medium … to create media.”
