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    CHEN XIAOYUN

    Né en 1971, Province du Hubei
    Vit et travaille à Beijing

    Collections

    Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, U.S.A.
    Wemhoener, Allemagne
    M+Collection, Hong Kong

    Expositions personnelles

    2014
    Chen Xiaoyun: Twenty-one Poems of Lenin, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

    2013
    Hysteria, Metaphorical and Metonymical Life-World, CHEN Xiaoyun, A4 Contemporary Arts Center, Chengdu
    CHEN Xiaoyun: Darker than Darkness, Death beyond Death, Fire Burning Fire, Walking Down along the Stairway, ShanghART Beijing, Beijing

    2012
    « Zhuiku Tablet » Annotation-CHEN Xiaoyun, ShanghART Beijing, Beijing

    2010
    Why Life, ShanghART Beijing, Beijing

    2009
    Emerald Tablet, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai

    2008
    Faint, MC, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
    Love You Big Boss, The Project Gallery, New York, U.S.A.

    Expositions collectives

    2016
    Exotic Stranger curated by Bao Dong, Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris

    2015
    7 SEVEN: Group Exhibition, ShanghART Singapore, Singapour
    Stereognosis Zone, RMCA, Guangzhou
    Comfort, ShanghART Beijing Group Exhibition, ShanghART Beijing, Beijing
    The Civil Power, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing
    Paper, ShanghART Singapore, Singapour
    China 8, Contemporary Art from China at the Rhine and Ruhr, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Allemagne
    Re-exposure, Poly Gallery, Hong Kong
    Essential Matters-Moving Images from China, Borusan Contemporary Perili Kosk, Istanbul, Turquie
    The System of Objects, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

    2014
    Rouge, Shanghai Night Club, Shanghai
    Montevideo Biennale, Montevideo, Uruguay
    In & Out Réel ShanghART, Réel Department Store, Shanghai
    Landscape: the Virtual, the Actual, the Possible?, Times Museum, Guangdong
    Now You See: New Chinese Video Art from the Collection of Dr. Michael I. Jacobs,Whitebox Art Center, New York
    Post-Sense Sensibility, Duddell’s, Hong Kong
    The 8 of Paths, Art Exhibition in the Uferhallen, Uferhallen, Berlin, Allemagne
    Einblicke – In Die Sammlung Wemhöner, OSRAM Höfe, Berlin, Allemagne
    Starlight, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

    2013
    Clutch, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai
    Foundational Work II, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai
    Post-Politics, Seven Chinese Artists of the New Generation, artshare.com
    Contemporary Art in China, 1990-2012, Zhong Gallery, Berlin, Allemagne
    Moving On Asia, Towards a New Art Network 2004-2013, City Gallery Wellington, Nouvelle Zélande

    2012
    Queen LiLi ‘s Garden, BIRD HEAD, CHEN Xiaoyun, GENG Jianyi, LIANG Yue, SUN Xun, YANG Fudong Video& Photography, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai
    Narrative and Narrative Forms, LIANZHOUFOTO2012, Lianzhou, Guangdong
    Conceptual Renewal, Short History of Chinese Contemporary Photographical Art, Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing
    Perspectives 180 – Unfinished Country, New Video from China, The Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, U.S.A.
    Architectural Photography–Made in China, Guest Exhibition of the International Photography Scene in Koeln Museum of Applied Arts, MAKK, Cologne, Allemagne
    Pulse Reaction, An Exchange Project on Art Practice, Times Museum, Guangdong
    Uninkable, TOP Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai

    2011
    Moving Image In China : 1988-2011, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai Poster Exhibition, TOP Events, Shanghai
    Move on Asia, the End of Video Art, Casa Asia-Barcelona, Barcelone, Espagne

    2010
    DIAL 62761232, A Document On A Contemporary Art Event, ShanghART Taopu, Shanghai
    Jungle: A Close-Up Focus on Chinese Contemporary Art Trends, Platform China, Beijing

    2009
    Bourgeoisified Proletariat, Contemporary Art Exhibition in Songjiang, Shanghai
    Warm Up, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
    Retrospect and Exploration, Collection Exhibition from Fine Arts Literature Art Center, Hubei Province Art Museum, Wuhan
    Shanghai Kino, KUNSTHALLE BERN, Suisse
    Blackboard, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai
    Another Scene, Artists’ Projects, Concepts and Ideas, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai

    2008
    Chinese Freedom, T SPACE, Beijing
    Out of Love, Contemporary Art Group Show, SOKA Art Center, Beijing
    Insomnia, Photographs Exhibition, BizART, Shanghai
    Artseason, The Third China New Media Art Festival, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou
    16e Biennale de Sydney, Sydney, Australie

    2007
    Amateur World, Platform China, Beijing
    Deviate, The 1st Anhui Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition, Gold Zone, Hefei, Anhui Drapeaux Gril, CAPC- Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France

    2006
    Gifts 2: A Case of Contemporary Art, Fanren Villa, Hangzhou
    It’s All Right, Contemporary Art Exhibition, Hu Qing Tang Museum of Traditional Chinese Medi- cine, Hangzhou
    Nunca salgo sin mi cámara / Never Go Out Without My DVcam, Video en china, Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid, Espagne
    Alllooksame/Tutttuguale?, Art from China, Japan and Korea, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebau- dengo, Turin, Italie
    China Contemporary, Architecture, Art and Visual Culture, Pays-Bas Architecture Institute, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Pays-Bas Fotomuseum, Pays-Bas
    Poetical Realism: A Reinterpretation of Jiangnan, RCM Art Museum, Nanjing
    Thirty-Eight Solo Exhibitions, 2577 Longhua Road Creative Garden, Shanghai
    Microcosm, Chinese Contempory Art, Macao Museum of Art (Macao Culture Centre), Macao
    CHEN Xiaoyun, Andeas Koch, Heidi Specker,buerofriedrich, Berlin, Allemagne
    « Manhattan » The Project, New York, U.S.A
    Busan Biennale 2006, Busan, Corée
    4e Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art, Corée

    2005
    Gifts 1, a Case of Contemporary Art, Modern Art Museum Of Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou
    The Second Guangzhou Triennial Self Organisation, BizART: How to Turn Guangzhou into Shanghai, Xinyi International Club, Guangzhou
    The Second Guangzhou Triennial, BEYOND: an extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
    In the Deep of Reality, A Case of Chinese Contemporary Art, Basement of Tianyu Apartment, Hangzhou
    Something Is Happening!, Maple-poplar Woods – In Orioles Singing in the Willows Park, Hangzhou
    Mahjong, Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Suisse
    Let Some Ideas Be Seen, Hangzhou
    Shanghai Constructions, Group exhibition by 10 artists, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai
    Move On Asia: Anination & Single Channel Video Art Festival, REMO, Japon
    Bangkok International Short Film Festival (French/Asian), Bangkok, Thaïlande
    T1 – Torino Triennial, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italie
    The Second Triennial of Chinese Art, Archaeology of the Future, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing
    Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art 2005, Yokohama, Japon
    Out of Sight, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, Pays-Bas

    2004
    Maze-2004 Chinese New Media Art Festival, China Academy Of Fine Arts, Hangzhou
    5e Shanghai Biennale, Techniques of the Visible, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai
    Dial 62761232 (Express Delivery Exhibition), Contemporary Art Exhibition, BizART, Shanghai
    Shanghai Surprise, Lothringer13 – Stadtische Kunsthalle München, Munich, Allemagne
    Scarify, China Modern Indepengdent Image Exhibition,Beijing; Chongqing; Xi’an
    Plug and Play, Contemporary Art Exhibition, Wuha
    Chinese Independent Films Screenings 2003-2004, Nanjing
    Video Exhibition, on the Hill, Baitaling Art Space, Hangzhou
    Blink in Video Festival, Beijing; Shanghai; Changsha; Hangzhou
    Format, Contemporary Art Exhibition, 31#Bar, Hangzhou

    2003
    Distance, The Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
    Post-Sense Sensibility: Inside Story,Magazine Children’s Theater, Beijing
    Chinese Independents, Mainland Film & Video Festival, Hong Kong
    Relate to Word, Contemporary Art Exhibition, Hangzhou
    The Different Same, International Art Exhibition, Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai
    The Minority is Subordinate to the Majority, BizART, Shanghai
    China Contempo II – Illusions and Perceptions of the City, Art Seasons, Singapour
    System, Short Videos from the World 2002-2003, BizArt, Shanghai
    White Tower Mountain (Bai Ta Ling), Contemporary Art Exhibition, Bai Ta Ling Art Space, Hangzhou

    2002
    The Long March: A Working Visual Display, Ganzi, Sichuan
    Greetings to Macau: Challenging Video Art from Around the World, Macao Asian Pacific Video Exhibition, Sydney, Australie
    Harvest, China Contemporary Art Exhibition, Beijing

    2001
    Non-Linear Narrative, The New-Media Art Festival,China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou
    Mantic Ecstasy, Digital Image and Video Art, Hangzhou; Shanghai; Beijing
    The Visible City, Video Art Exhibition, Macao
    47th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Allemagne

    2000
    « IN » Art Exhibition, Purple Hills, Nanjing
    Inertia & Mask- Works on Paper, Shanghai Oil Painting & Sculpture Institute, Shanghai Home?, Contemporary Art Exhibition, Yuexing Furniture Plaza, Shanghai

    1999
    The Same But Also Changed, Photography Exhibition, Shanghai Art for Sale, Shanghai Plaza, Shanghai

    Prix

    2012
    New Photography of the Year by Lianzhou Foto 2012

    Projets

    2015
    Exhibition in French Metro, Lyon Metro Station, French

    2014
    Shanghai Deal, Self-organized Art Fair, Radical Space, Shanghai
    The Journey of Art, Follow-up exhibition of John Moores Painting Prize, Artemis, Shanghai

    A GNASHING OF THE TEETH: THE ART OF CHEN XIAOYUN

    Text by Sun Dongdong, Translation Matthew Schrader

    Published in Leap, December 1er, 2010

    “Symbols are the only tool by which I profit from the labor of others.” – Chen Xiaoyun
    “Poetic” is the word most often used to describe work by members of Hangzhou’s prolific video art community. Over time, relationships between the community’s members have changed, members have moved, and artistic differences of opinion have appeared, scattering the original membership to the four winds. But, even now, the “poetic” label still remains affixed to the group’s work. What exactly is this very generalsounding adjective referring to? We really don’t know. There are more or less two possibilities for what people might mean when they evoke the word “poetic”: the first is a kind of formal linguistic analysis, the commentator seizing on a paradigmatic relationship within the work. This relationship might arise from the work’s symbolism, props, characters, or dialogue. Or it might arise from the non-linear narrative logic formed by a series of shots once they’ve been edited. The second possibility is a kind of essentialist inertia embedded in the mind of the commentator, wedding the artists to Hangzhou’s cultural scene. Perhaps, in that moment, the critic is thinking not of the artist about whom he or she is supposedly writing, but about fitting that artist into the mold created by Yang Fudong.
    Unfortunately, the somewhat inexplicable perception of Yang Fudong’s “movies” as a reference point is something with which each the members of the Hangzhou video-art community must contend. With this in mind, it’s not hard to understand why Chen Xiaoyun, a core original member of the campaign, has such a negative opinion of his longest work to date, 2004’s Queen Lili’s Garden. Indeed, after Queen Lili’s Garden we see no more feature-length films by Chen Xiaoyun. As of late, though, his focus has not been on the length of his works, but on his insistence that they reaffirm a kind of “defect” that finds its emotional origins in realism. This insistence gives his works a certain nameless quality all their own. The visual language of these works should, along with their obvious awareness of their own limits, be enough to thoroughly put to rest the coarse nostalgia that would invoke the word “poetic.” In Chen Xiaoyun’s works Lash (2004) and Drag (2006) the male protagonist’s suffering and submission seem to be without rhyme or reason. In Lash, as the crack of a whip echoes in the background, we see through the glare of a flashing light a series of close-ups: a naked man dragging a withered tree branch in the dead of night affects a range of expressions, interwoven with shots of human and natural landscapes and the forms of animals. In Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. As we hear his hurried breathing, the camera wheels to a view of a man’s shadow cast against a wall. The shadow is wearing a long, pointed hat and alternates between tugging at the other end of the rope, then letting it fall slack. There is no question that the shadow is in complete control. After a brief fast-forwarded section, we hear a human voice, low, slow and deep, murmuring something that sounds like an incantation.

    The “stories” of Drag and Lash are derived from a single verb, but their manner of expression could not be more different. Lash’s fragmented visual vocabulary leaves a deep impression on the viewer. The narrative played out in Drag, while relatively abundant in comparison with that of Lash, is not very clear, despite an epigram added by Chen Xiaoyun (“You cannot, could not, be in the dark, about all the darkness”). In truth, the epigram only adds to the film’s ambiguity, making it seem as if the film were a visual derivation of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” or a mockery of human desire. Many times, attempts to explain or to clarify an artist’s works have the distinct air of a futile endeavor, but in the pessimistic tone of Lash and Drag we can sense a tendency towards convergence. Moreover, in Chen Xiaoyun’s later works, we discover time and time again the visual keywords and narrative style strongly established in his two earlier works.
    Chen Xiaoyun’s later works—I’m a King (2007), Merry Christmas (2006), BI (2007), Love You Big Boss (2007), Night-2.4KM (2009), FIRE-3000KG (2009)—are all, I’m a King and Love You Big Boss excepted, set at night (even the two exceptions take place in night’s close cousin: the well-lit room). Obviously, “night” is one of Chen’s touchstones. In his films, night is a culturally oriented symbol. Night opens the valve on the insomniac’s wild fantasies, and liberates the unspoken words hidden under the surface of reality. Perhaps an appropriate opening line for a Chen Xiaoyun film might be, “Late one evening . . .”

    In Merry Christmas, late at night on a street corner a young man beats someone in a Santa costume for no reason that we can discern. The absurdity inherent in this collision between a legendary religious character and the “real world” does not seem to express Chen Xiaoyun’s skepticism towards the genre itself so much as towards those who would advance a kind of deductive logic that insists on the “rationality” of violence in everyday life. In BI (a romanization of a Chinese character which originally referred to a mythical beast, and later came to mean “prison”), on a rainy night out on an open plain a man dressed in rags (à la Psycho) cracks a whip with all his might towards nine trucks of the kind often seen on construction sites. At the end of the film he stands in the mud striking a solemn, stirring pose. He looks like the note from a musical score. Night-2.4KM takes place during the course of a single evening: a group of what look like migrant workers gather on a country road and set off walking in the same direction. It’s worth pointing out that the final shot of Night-2.4KM parodies the “marching production team” shot made famous by Chinese movies from the revolutionary era. The technique imbues Night-2.4KM with a realistic force that transforms it from parable into prophecy. It’s in this that we can discern the reciprocal relationship, torturous but believable nonetheless, that binds together BI and Night-2.4KM.

    In Love You Big Boss a group of Chinese street performers stage a regrettable performance of the American national anthem using traditional folk instruments. Whether or not this scene is meant to address itself to sensitive political issues is secondary. What’s important is the initial reaction to the state of existence that is “living,” forcing us to reevaluate our own predicament. The piles of burning books and the young people who love burning them in FIRE-3000KG are just like the man locked in a steel cage in I’m a King, proclaiming that he’s the king of the world: each is filled with a hysterical excitement. Chen Xiaoyun is, almost consciously it seems, emphasizing the spiritual symptoms of the disease. “Light” is snuffed out entirely by its symbiotic relationship with the “darkness” (bringing to mind the sunlight enveloping a bamboo forest in Queen Lili’s Garden). The sun will not rise again, and the night becomes an unbreakable iron box.

    In these films, the shortest of which is three or four minutes, the longest ten, both the position of the camera and its field of vision constantly remind us to pay attention to Chen Xiaoyun’s role as narrator. The camera also reveals the artist’s favorite rhetorical techniques for building his film’s narrative (his frequent and heartfelt use of close-up shots, for example). In his works, these shots are an ever-thickening layer of adverbs and adjectives that constitute the visual expression of the films’ characters, objects, and behaviors, some shots explicating with meticulously delicate precision, others painting the scene with powerful, intense strokes. However, when this kind of skill is applied to a linear narrative, it’s impossible to avoid a visual style that feels fragmented or even trivial. In works like Chen’s, with their simple plots and fixed scenery, it can feel especially abrupt. It seems as if Chen is doing it on purpose. The natural result of his linear narratives is an unprepossessing, intimate, everyday feel. In a certain physical sense, it seems as if he’s accepting what film can tell us about reality. In another sense, Chen’s narrative style is his attempt to bring us into contact with what he sees from behind the camera, to draw on his experience to construct a linguistic bridge between the marginalized forms, the symbols, and the imagery that his gaze reveals.
    Chen Xiaoyun’s recent exhibition at the Beijing branch of ShanghART gallery, Why Life, featured a three-channel video that seems to move him towards a new narrative style. A fourteen-minute long stream of pure information, it attacks the problem of deciphering “life” from multiple angles. On three screens (one main, two secondary) one hundred phrases alternate with a hundred short video clips. Although this work, from which the exhibition takes its title, is structurally reminiscent of Drag, it also elevates, on a visual level, words and phrases to the same level as video, taking into account the screentime of both these sentences and their corresponding video interludes in calculating the length of the films. If one of the distinguishing characteristics of Chen’s earlier works was the hysterical structure of their narrative, then in these works we see the thorough externalization of that previously internal hysteria: static text and moving image jostle for space on the video screens, quick on each other’s heels, the rhythm of the changes outstripping our ability to keep pace. It is, without a doubt, a work designed to overwhelm the senses. It vibrates in harmony with the sympathies of its viewer, each sentence recalling a misfortune that may have befallen them in their own lives. The pictures, sounds, and internal monologues seem to be drawn from victims of suffering and humiliation, like “minor characters” in an epic novel. Although “life” is expressed in these works as a concept only, the words and phrases contained therein continue to draw the works back towards the world of specific language and real emotions. Compared with Chen Xiaoyun’s earlier works, Why Life confirms the increasingly realistic direction of his creations. But it’s a bizarre sort of confirmation. The words and the phrases of the work enumerate every kind of “normal” phenomenon imaginable, but their sense of urgency seems to address itself not towards any expression of “why life,” but towards evoking within us a genuine collective emotion. This is the source from whence Chen’s works draw their life force, as well as the wellspring of their “defects”: In Why Life there’s one sentence that reads, “Symbols are the only tool by which I profit from the labor of others.” Is Chen here mocking the practice of art, or offering us the formula with which to decode his work? At the very least, in this country of ours, obsessed as it is with silly web comics, symbols are something that couldn’t be easier to enjoy. As such, symbols may be a form of criticism, and the work’s final line, “A gnashing of the teeth,” may itself be a kind of critique.