A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.
A particularly generative aspect of Lu Chunsheng’s work is the way it breaches the boundary between documentary and fiction. Rather than merely illustrate it, his conceptual and methodological coherence broadens and extends his inquiry into everyday life. Unlike many of his fellow artists who emerged from the same generation, Lu does not focus on the alienation inherent to an accelerated urbanization and its stream of rapidly moving images and perplexed inhabitants.
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...