Chen Zhen

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist

Portland, Institute of Contemporary Art, The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers, August - September 1997
New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Chen Zhen: A Tribute, February - August 2003, pp. 102-103, illustrated
Kennesaw State University, Sturgis Library Gallery, Merging of East and West: The Installations of Chen Zhen, January - March 2006, p. 10, illustrated

Chen Zhen was born in Shanghai in 1955 to a family of doctors and intellectuals. As with many other young Chinese students, the harsh stringencies of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) formed the backbone of the artist’s cultural development. In 1973 Chen Zhen enrolled at the renowned Shanghai School of Fine and Applied Art where he received a rigorous training in traditional Chinese painting, drawing and sculpture. Having been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease early on, the artist chose to spend time with Tibetan monks in order to learn how to face disease via the tenets of Zen Buddhism.  In 1986 he moved to Paris to study at the École national supérieure des beaux-arts where he was subsequently appointed teacher. Though he had always been aware of the developments of western art history, Chen Zhen’s move to France initiated his mature development as an artist. He soon abandoned the traditional medium of painting and ventured into installation art, “codifying his trans-cultural experiences into visual language that fuses Eastern sensibility with Western Avant-Gardism.” (Exh. Cat., Kennesaw State University, Sturgis Library Gallery, January – March 2006, p. 3)

Opening of a Closed Center, one of Chen Zhen’s great masterpieces, powerfully embodies the poetic blending as well as the inherent tensions which are at play throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Opening of a Closed Center is the companion work to My Diary in Shaker Village (Lot 494) - two works which were conceived while the artist spent time in a Shaker community in Sabbath Lake, Maine.  As Roberta Griffin has noted, in Opening of a Closed Center, “wooden screens from Chinese monastery windows create a quiet space that holds a simple Shaker-style chair and an altar made from Chinese furniture suspended above the floor. Upon the altar are objects of everyday life, water and rice pots. These do not normally appear on traditional Chinese altars: however, the artist’s installation intuitively connects Shaker and Taoist beliefs about the sacred origins of human activity.” (Exh. Cat., Kennesaw State University, Sturgis Library Gallery, Merging of East and West: The Installations of Chen Zhen, 2006, p. 11)