Chen Zhen. Purification Room, 2000-2015; found objects, clay; approx. 850 x 1100 x 450 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Entering the Art Deco spaces of the Rockbund Museum, visitors encounter the rather spectacular Purification Room (2000–2015), a large space filled with everyday objects—sofas, TVs, chairs and tables, bicycles and shopping trolleys—all entirely coated with mud, as are the walls and floor. Traditionally, Chinese medicine used mud to cleanse and detoxify, and Chen Zhen thought of it as representing purity, simplicity, the natural world, and the peace of being laid to rest. The experience is one of stillness and silence, as if we have entered a mysterious unknown civilization revealed by an archaeological excavation. The quotidian artifacts of our modern daily lives seem to have a greater significance, becoming unfamiliar and strange.

The next level presents Le Bureau de Change (1996–2004), which is constructed from a traditional Shanghai communal public toilet, very common in the past when few people had their own bathrooms. Inside the darkened wooden structure, the pit toilet is full of money, gold and silver coins glinting in the dim light. The noise of constant flushing fills the space. This savagely witty work possesses even greater resonance today, when so many Chinese citizens are experiencing the shock of losing their money in an unprecedented economic downturn. The boom times may be over, and some fear their newfound prosperity could be simply flushed away.

Chen Zhen. Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000; crystal, iron, glass; 95 x 70 x 190 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

For me, the most important work in the exhibition is Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body. The major internal organs (heart, lung, spleen, liver, kidney, gall bladder, stomach, intestines, spinal column, and so forth) were created from blown glass, displayed on a glass medical-examination table, in a darkened space. There are twelve versions of this work, corresponding to signs of the Chinese Zodiac; this one is the Rooster. The crystal organs cast beautiful shadows on the floor below the table, representing the ephemerality and fragility of life, and the reflection of the inner reality in the physical manifestation of the body’s health. Both of the artist’s parents were doctors, and he himself began to study medicine, before being diagnosed with a rare, and ultimately fatal, form of anemia at the age of 25. His philosophical approach to life, and to his art practice, was profoundly influenced by the time that he spent in Tibet living with Buddhist monks. Chen Zhen’s landscape of the body is created by the reflections and refractions of the blown glass and the glass table, with a suggestion that all physical reality is illusory—and entirely temporary.

Chen Zhen. Daily Incantations, 1996; wood, metal, Chinese chamber pots, electric wires, parts of electronic objects, sound system; 230 x 700 x 350 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Daily Incantations is a monumental installation that appears at first sight to be a structure of traditional Buddhist temple bells. A closer inspection reveals it is created from 101 traditional Shanghainese barrel-shaped wooden chamber pots, some of which have been fitted with speakers broadcasting the sound of the chamber pots being washed, and other noises. At the center of the installation a sphere is filled with a jumble of TV sets, cassette players, video recorders, telephones, and tangled skeins of electrical wires. For Hou Hanru, these mundane, even ugly and unclean objects, fast disappearing as a result of modernization and Westernization, are “sacrificial objects in cultural conflict.” Like the artist’s painstaking documentation of the destruction and demolition that forever changed the face of his city, they represent change, and the loss of tradition. Like Nam June Paik’s iconic 1970s TV Buddha, Chen Zhen’s work of the 1990s explores postcolonialism through the use of  found objects: traditional Chinese wooden furniture and 20th-century electrical or electronic devices. The artist’s intended juxtaposition of past and present, East and West, today has a more elegiac quality of obsolescence, as his TV sets and tape recorders are themselves now artifacts of history.

Chen Zhen: Without Going to New York and Paris, Life Could Be Internationalised is on view at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai through October 7, 2015.

Zeng Fanzhi, Untitled (Hospital Series), 1994, Oil on canvas, 179.1 x 199.4 cm

The listlessness of people waiting in an emergency waiting room contrasts discomfortingly with the gruesomeness of the chunks of human flesh appearing as fresh meat and liberal washes of red. This work is from one of Zeng Fanzhi’s earliest series, known as the “Hospital” series, markedly influenced by German Expressionism and its manifestation of society’s anxieties and decadence, as studied during his formative years at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in China. Zeng lived next to the hospital and would recall in his early paintings, scenes of doctors and fearful patients in emergency rooms, and the proximity between humans and flesh to underscore human frailty. The white-suited doctor in the foreground, appearing to be blind to the pain of a patient beside him, was characteristic of the critique of institutions and society present in Chinese contemporary art of the 80s and 90s.

Zeng Fanzhi, Night, 2005, Oil on canvas

From the early 2000s, Zeng began shifting away from rough and large strokes, as he played with a technique of spontaneous brushstrokes, sometimes painting with two hands, using two or four brushes in an attempt to release control. He took inspiration from Song dynasty art, particularly the ways landscape paintings emphasized humankind’s insignificance to the universe. The “Night” series comprises his paintings of landscapes, sometimes with or without figures. In Night (2005), a lone woman appears to be on a continuous journey, to an elusive destination. For Zeng, these landscapes are not real, but a consciousness of the world and a representation of a restless journey of discovery.

Zeng Fanzhi, Hyena, 2010, Oil on canvas, 250 x 350cm, image from Rockbund Art Museum

An exhibition of Zeng’s recent works is currently on show from 12 August to 12 October 2010, at 2010 Zeng Fanzhi at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. His “Night” series have evolved to the “Jungles” series, of which Hyena is a part of, and his recent works introduce a keen awareness of nature and animals. The carcass in Hyena is reminiscent of the flesh in his “Hospital” series, connecting Zeng’s perspective of man and animals. Due to an injury, Zeng had to paint with his left hand, resulting in unruly strokes which contribute to a sense of the wild, destructive, yet arrestingly beautiful state of nature.

Foreground: Mammoth's Tusks, 2010, Wood, 340 x 160 x 130cm; Background: Covered Unidentified Object, 2010, Golden Silk Nanmu, 266 x 100 x 49cm, Image from Rockbund Art Museum

This exhibition also marks his venture into sculptural works. While significantly different through the abstract forms, the distinctive introspection in Zeng’s works remain. The sheer physicality of Mammoth’s Tusks weighted into space makes obvious the absence of a body and Covered Unidentified Object presents a creature beneath a cloak, on a coffin-like structure. In unison, the sculptures bring into the present what had been made extinct and forgotten. Using lacquering techniques, Mammoth’s Tusks were painted, polished when the paint dried, and this act was repeated numerous times, enabling a meditative process for Zeng.

Born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, Zeng participated in the Guangzhou Triennial (2009) and Venice Biennale (2009). A winner of the Martell Artist of the Year 2009, recent solo exhibitions were held at Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery for Foreign Art in Bulgaria and the Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne Métropole.