Artists › Wu Shanzhuan › Biography - Exhibitions
Biography of Wu Shanzhuan
Wu Shanzhuan was born in Fujian in 1960.
Influences
Wu Shanzhuan is one of the most influential artists in the avant-garde movement. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as a long-haired conceptual artist known for his experimental works with language and the use of big character posters, a kind of precursor to the better known works of Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, which also toyed with language and meaning.
Wu was part of the red humor group, engaged in performance art, created installations, appeared at the famed no u turn exhibition in 1989, he created a "Big Business" performance that involved selling shrimp; and later left for Europe, where he spent more than a decade in Germany and Iceland before returning to China in 2005.
His works are filled with satire, language tricks, symbols and radical games. He often posed nude in his art works, for a while with his former wife, Inga Thorsdottir. His work is filled with absurd imagery and fantastical language.
As one of the leaders of the Chinese Conceptual Movement in 1980s, Wu Shanzhaun was the first artist in China to incorporate textual pop references into his work. Wu's pivotal 1986 installation, Red Humour International, laid the foundation for his highly idiosyncratic and sophisticated approach to painting, which forgoes image in favor of political jingoism, religious scripture, and advertising slogans.
Wu's canvases appear as a combination of graffiti and expressionism. Rendered with painterly spontaneity, words, symbols, and diagrams battle for space in a virtual terrain between conveyed meaning and pictorial abstraction.
Through the act of artistic negotiation, Wu's texts become dislocated from their original context and stripped of their cultural signification. Reformed and repackaged as sumptuous fields of color and texture, his mass media dictates are purified as empty lexicons for new usage and contemplation.
Wu's unique process of painting as writing is exemplified in his Today No Water series. Conceived as a graphic novel, each canvas is a chapter of a continuous stream of consciousness narrative. These works don't tell a story per se, but rather present a visual tension between fragmented phrases and images, culminating in dizzying compositions that map out free-style associations of ideas, references, and symbols.
Approaching the re-systemizing of informational structures as an intuitive process, Wu reconstitutes the articulated design of print matter as chaotic overload, his bold logos and by-lines emerge as subconscious expressions, striving for intimate cognition. Muted washes, dabs of color, hurried gestures, and wayward drizzles overlap, erase, and compete for perspective hierarchy, suggesting an algorithmic order to the perplexities of individual identity and global communication.
Exhibitions of Wu Shanzhuan
Solo Exhibitions:
2001
- Today No Water, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York Thing's Right(s) -Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York
1999
- Thing's Right(s) - Cuxhaven 1999, Cuxhavener Kunstverein, Germany Vege-Pleasure, Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong
1998
- Vege-Pleasure, Ingolfsstraeti 8 Gallery, The Reykjavik Art Festival 1998, Iceland
1996
- Please Don't Move, Bahnwärterhaus, Gallery der Stadt, Esslingen
1991
- Today No Water, 22 Bar, Reykjavik
Group Exhibitions:
2003
- A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic; toured to Art Museum Tennis Palace, Helsinki
2002
- Paris-Pekin, Espace Cardin, Paris The 1st Guangzhou Triennial - Reinterpretation, A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China
- Made By Chinese, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris
- Chicago Art Fair, Chicago
2001
- III Biennale Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
- The 1st Chengdu Biennale, Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, China
2000
- Conceptualist Art: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, the Walker Art Center; Miami Art Museum
- Continental Shift, Musee d'Art Moderne Liege, Belgium Nordicliveart.org, Paletten, Gothenburg, Sweden
1999
- Power of the Word, Taiwan Museum of Art, Taizhong, Taiwan. Toured in Grinnell College, Iowa; Hamilton College, New York; University of Arizona, Arizona and Skidmore College, New York until January 2002.
- Stipendiaten, Kunsthaus, Hamburg
1998
- Inside Out - New Chinese Art, Asia Society Galleries, New York, P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; toured in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Art Museum of Mexico; Tacoma Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; National Gallery of Art, Canberra; and Hong Kong Museum of Art until 2000 Conceptualist Art: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York. Toured in Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada in 2001
- Berlin/Berlin, Platform, Berlin, Germany
- NEID 7 Release, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
- Schnittstelle/Produktion, Shedhalle, Zürich, Switzerland ...es grünt so grün..., Bonner Kunstverein, Germany
1997
- The 7th Bienal International E.D.C.R., Portugal
- Another Kind of Communism, The Cable Gallery, Helsinki
1996
- Unfrieden..., Hamburger Woche der Bildende Kunst, Hamburg
- The Scream, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj, Copenhagen
1995
- Der Abschied von der Ideologie, Kampnagelfabrik, Hamburg, Germany Nordic Wells, Nordic House Reykjavik
- Des del Paîs del Centre - Avantguardes artîstiques Xineses, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain
1994
- Aus der Eisenzeit, Kampnagelfabrik,Hamburg, Germany Maos Ungezähmte Kinder, Römer Museum Hildesheim, Germany
1993
- China's New Art, Post-1989, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Arts Centre; toured in Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; University of Oregon Art Museum, Eugene; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Salina Arts Center, Kansas; Chicago Cultural Center, Illinois; San Jose Museum of Art, California from 1994 to 1997
- Mao Goes Pop, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Made in Hamburg, Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany Chinese Avant-Garde, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK. Toured in Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odensee, Denmark and Kunsthall Rotterdam, The Netherlands. La Biennale APERTO, Venice Fontanelle, Kunstspeicher, Potsdam, Germany Fragmented Memory - The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Frankfurt
1992
- Chinese Avant-Garde, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
1989
- National Gallery, Beijing
1988
- 3 x China, Galerie Vorsetzen, Hamburg
