Mr. Black, Mr. Navy, Mr. Stripes

2017

Bruno Zhu

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Mr. Black, Mr. Navy, Mr. Stripes is a photographic series of opera gloves made of men’s tailored trousers that were presented in 2017 in “La Plage” in Paris, a shop window turned into an experimental art space. The personification of the objects named after characters intended to compose a fiction from the display. The project follows Zhu’s thinking on the definition of “queer”: how to express a state? Applied to a space (what he calls “queering the space”) allows him to talk about emotional space: Something soft that can collapse anytime and see that collapse as a potentiality to become new modes of being. For the visitors, this installation, seen as a soft sculpture, addressed the haptic sense, but can refer also to the semiology and the construction of myths. Using a fashion vocabulary resulting from his education in fashion design, Zhu ties a commentary on consumption as signifier of power and class.

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Bruno Zhu (b. 1991, Porto, Portugal, currently based in London) explores his fascination for photography’s ambivalent symbol as surface and object, representation and appropriation. Transposed into 3D installation, he explores the mechanism of desire and identity, through the fictions implied in consumption and commodities. Flatness is a state that particularly interests the artist, from the page of a magazine, becoming an image-object creating an augmented reality. Intimacy is also a recurrent component of his work. He is currently working on a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Lisbon in 2018, based on the narrative of his parents, who are Chinese immigrants who arrived in the 80s in Portugal. They run a store in a small town of Portugal, in which Bruno Zhu curated several exhibitions with the complicity of the employees.

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Colors:

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• fashion.n.03
• power.n.01
• class.n.03
• homosexuality.n.01
• desire.n.02
• consumption.n.03