Xu Zhen®

ShanghART Gallery

Shanghai / Beijing / Singapore

www.shanghartgallery.com

Abstract Communication

- The Countable Passion

ShanghART Gallery is honored to share with I.G.A. Xu Zhen®'s large-scale oil on canvas series - Passion.

Passion, a series of paintings with abstract expressionist style, is not only a derivative of smart social media but also a representation of daily life on the Internet. All pictures are translated from screenshots of social media conversation - that is, all kinds of cropped and smeared conversation screenshots.

The countable passion is the most interesting point of the series, that is, the artist uses the actual weight of each work as the caption of the work.

I am a landscape painter, paint the places where people stroll around now that are not the parks of the impressionist’s time anymore, but still green.

Xu Zhen®

The Passion series is the artist's first series of abstract expressionism in his artistic career. Intuitively, it seems that the medium and content are completely different from the previous style of Xu Zhen® which are installations or performances with strong concepts. However, tracing to its source, the Passion series is a transformation of the popular culture of the era into abstract expressionism by juxtaposing history with the present. The artist uses the characteristics of oil painting as a medium to convey the collective symptoms of an era through shapes and colors.

View more works

About Xu Zhen®

Xu Zhen, born in 1977, now lives and works in Shanghai. In 2013, Xu Zhen® was launched, operating the individual’s work as a company brand, commit to art creation, and cutting-edge culture development. Xu Zhen® presents visual ambiguity and the sense of displacement in work due to the juxtaposition of different cultural symbols and states. In an ironic and humorous way, the work becomes a structural cultural intervention and motivates viewers’ thinking about “veracity”. The critical idea and pioneering operation pattern of Xu Zhen® challenge issues of creation pattern, collection system, and originality in the context of contemporary art, renewing the longtime fixed standard.