Zheng Guogu’s recent catalogue "Jumping out of Three Dimensions, Staying Outside five Elements”, shows as cover image “Me and My Teacher” a photo of the artist squatting on the road next to a foolishly laughing youth. The meeting with this exceptional teacher, actually Yangjiang city’s village lunatic, is like many random encounters and coincidences a trigger for Zheng’s projects and art works. Friends, his family, objects, activities, work experience, museums, everything that is related to the artist’s life can be implicated in and leave traces in his creation. It is as if the peripheral southern-Chinese provincial town of Yangjiang was a large laboratory for this outstanding artist. But “my teacher” is not only subject and trigger, but also a kind of conceptual guiding figure: the lunatic’s abnormal, disrupted state of mind puts him at the margins of society. Connecting to this state of mind allows Zheng to obtain a marginal position in regards to reality and restricting facts, too. As he mentions in an interview with Hu Fang “In art you can make an assumption that is not true and yet you can make it take place in reality.” A lunatic state of mind engendering disruption with reality therefore seems desirable for a person dealing with artistic creation. The same is true for a marginal geographic position. For Zheng Guogu, Yangjiang, which he describes as a natural cleansing system allowing him to contemplate all day long, is the most appropriate location for an artist. Distance through marginality implies leisure, arbitrariness, and game, which are all important elements in Zheng’s artistic practice. Yet, even though he seeks distance and dissociation on a practical level, he nevertheless requests proximity and association in what concerns content: mass media, pop culture, and the reflections of China’s fast changing reality on all levels and in all facets of everyday life are subject to his interest. In this respect, Zheng Guogu acts like a contemporary literati: creating with leisure, but being concerned with the crucial topics of his time. As he states: “We are occupied with nothing, and yet we dare to do anything (…).” For Tang Contemporary Zheng Guogu realises “Processing Factory”,the replica of a factory for optical instruments, a replica that is nevertheless functional. Employees occupy the space and produce optical instruments. The only hints that this is an art work and not a real factory are its location within an art gallery, the visitors, which are evidently an art public, as well as models of workers and spray-painted reproductions of photos taken of former exhibitions of the work. These clues diminish the ambivalence of the given situation: does the location transform the activity or the activity the location? Yet, the actual dislocation created here reduces “Processing Factory” to a mere assumption. If we consider with Zheng art as the place where assumptions and hypothesis, can become reality, then a reality placed within such a hypothetical field, changes into nothing but an assumption. Having in mind China’s economic policy and development, including the recent agenda of cultural policy – the enhancement of creative industries – Zheng’s work obtains a particularly critical stance.