Date: 2010.05.30 - 07.18

Venue: Long March Space, Beijing 

Long March Space is pleased to present MadeIn’s solo exhibition Don’t Hang Your Faith on The Wall opening on June 5th and running until July 18th, 2010.

MadeIn is a progressive cultural production company founded by Shanghai’s leading artist Xu Zhen in 2009. This exhibition debuts MadeIn’s newest body of work True Image. Each work is named after a historical quote, amongst which are Milan Kundera’s “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting;” and Deng Xiaoping’s “Democracy is our goal, but the country must remain stable.”

Since last year, Xu Zhen, as China’s most celebrated conceptual star, has dissolved his identity into a new brand name MadeIn. MadeIn is a team of cultural workers, spearheaded by founder Xu Zhen and organized as a creative company to produce independent and commissioned artworks and exhibitions. Xu Zhen has chosen to engage with this conventional operational model to problematize cooperative cosplay relationships within the field of contemporary visual culture and to urgently examine the continual materialization of visual spectacles in society today.

MadeIn. (established 2009) is a cultural production company based in Shanghai. Drawing on Founder Xu Zhen’s vast array of experiences over the past decade, not only as artist, but also as arts organizer, including directing an artist run space, online art forum, and exhibition organizer/curator, the company provides a comprehensive approach towards art creation, blurring the lines between exhibition, production and curating, as well as authorship. MadeIn has shown in both China and abroad, at the UCCA, Beijing (2009), the S.M.A.K Museum, Gent, Belgium, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2010).

Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai) graduated from the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute in 1996 and has over the past decade consistently sought to push the boundaries of social assumption, cultural anomaly and the imagined world and its factual relation, to name but a few of the constructs to which he humorously critiques contemporary life. His work has been shown extensively in China and abroad, including Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2008; ‘PERFORMA07: Second Biennial of Visual Art Performance’, New York, USA, 2007; ‘The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China’, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, 2007; 51st Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2005; 2nd Yokohama Triennale, Japan, 2005; and the 49th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2001. 

"As long as the differences are discemible, they will not impede dialogue."

installation wedding dress, high heels, pearl, wax, abstract sculpture, wood, metal wire

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Sculpture Poly

"The people is a beast of muddy brain.
It does not know its own force; it only knows absolute obedience. "

Installation marble

"Crowds do not love logical argumentation,
they are not to be influenced by reasoning,
and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas. "

Installation granite, plastic plugs

"Poetry is an expression of life or even better--poetry is life itself.
Not only so, life in poetry expresses life better than reality does. "

Installation marble,barber shop lights ,sunny-side up egg

"A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation."

Installation steel

"Unification is a reductive process rather than a process of gain,
in which loyal believers never feel complete or secure. "

Painting acrylic on canvas

"In mass exercise, the greater the conflict between theory and reality,
the stronger its eagerness to impose beliefs on others. "

Installation wax, military caps

"The path to appearance is always accessible and traveled but one can go around it. "

Installation baseball bat, golf ball