Chen Zhen's legacy: the last works of this noted Chinese artist are the focus of an exhibition opening in New York this month. Through sculptures, installations and an unrealized project for a Zen garden, Chen explored themes of illness, exile and cultural difference

Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

Chen Zhen was a rising presence on the international scene when he died quite suddenly in December 2000 of complications relating to his lifelong struggle with autoimmune hemolytic anemia. In recent years, his work has been on view in Venice, Tel Aviv, Kwangju, Shanghai, Taipei, Lyon, Montreal and Salvador, Brazil. Chen, who was 45 when he died, was known for object-based installations imbued with gentle humor and a gleeful sense of the contradictions that emerge when cultural worlds collide. Deliberately open-ended, they were designed, as he once told me, to produce a "short circuit," a shock of disjunction that might pave the way for more substantial cultural contact.

Daily Incantations is a case in point. This work, which was first exhibited at Deitch Projects in New York in 1996 and then included in the 1997 Kwangju Biennale and the 1999 Carnegie International, featured wooden Chinese chamber pots transformed into a semblance of the Buddhist bells that for centuries have served to call practitioners to prayer. Old and new elements of Chinese history were deliberately mixed. Wafting from the "bells" were recorded sounds evocative of the strangely bifurcated China of Chen's childhood--rhythmic scouring of chamber pots mingled with recitation of passages from Mao's Little Red Book. Modernity also intruded in the form of a giant ball of junked TVs, radios, amplifiers, speakers and other pieces of mostly out-moded electronic equipment held together in the center of the installation by a tangle of wires. The work was a case study in cultural difference and clashing realities, juxtaposing physical and industrial waste while playing Buddhist spirituality off both Western materialism and Communist indoctrination. Daily Incantations also referred to the lagging state of development in China, a point underscored by the way that Western audiences were invited to take esthetic pleasure in preindustrial artifacts created for far ruder purposes.

Similarly subversive was Round Table (1995), created for an exhibition titled "Dialogue de Paix," curated by Adelina von Furstenberg at the United Nations Palace in Geneva. For this work, Chen collected chairs from every continent and embedded their seats in the tabletop of a large round wooden table. Extremely varied in shape and size, the chairs were an effective metaphor for the U.N.'s diversity, while the table intentionally evoked the large communal tables so often found in Chinese restaurants. At the same time, this hopeful promise of cross-cultural communication was undercut by the fact that no one could actually sit in chairs locked into a tabletop. Thus, the message was ambiguous, simultaneously promising and denying everyone a seat at the table.

In the last year of Chen's life, failing health forced him to turn down invitations to participate in a number of important exhibitions. He continued to work, however, and his output from this time, most of which has until now not been seen in the United States, exudes a darker and more personal tone. (1) In this, it seems to reflect his philosophical and physical struggle with his own mortality. This fall, an exhibition jointly organized by two curators, Gilbert Vicario at the ICA in Boston and Tony Guerrero at P.S. 1 in New York, presented his last works, in which Chen's personal meditations on the varying effectiveness of Eastern and Western medicine become a metaphor for the health of the social organism.

The exhibition, which debuted at the Boston ICA in the fall and will move in somewhat modified form to P.S. 1 on Feb. 16, sheds new light on a tragically curtailed career. Though a departure from the playful exuberance of Chen's better-known installations, these last works nevertheless manifest his lifelong concern with "transexperience," a term he coined to describe his own existence as a migrant between cultures. In Chen's parlance, "transexperience" is both an individual and a social condition, suggesting the inescapable uneasiness of life in a world whose borders have been rendered porous by the globalization of economies, politics and cultures. One place that it manifests itself is in what Chen referred to as the "eternal misunderstanding between East and West." (2) While such misunderstandings cannot be resolved, they can provide the artist with a medium through which communication of a sort takes place.

Chen's notion of "trans-experience" was in part a result of his own experiences of dislocation. He was born in Shanghai to a highly educated family of medical professionals. As an adolescent, he was remanded for "reeducation" to the Chinese countryside. After the Cultural Revolution subsided, he returned to Shanghai, where he studied theater and decorative arts at the Shanghai Fine Arts and Crafts School. He remained in China for another 10 years, during which he and other young artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Wenda Gu and Huang Yong Ping became leading figures in the Chinese avant-garde movement of the early 1980s. All of them drew on traditional Chinese thought and art as a subversive alternative to an official ideology that still regarded pre-revolutionary references and media as highly suspect. In some of his early paintings, Chen used abstract forms to represent the movement of Qi, or energy, a central element in traditional Chinese philosophy, while simultaneously making subtle references to something else the authorities frowned on: modernist abstraction.