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

An important aspect of "transexperience" was suggested by Crystal Ball (1999). Here, a glass globe filled with liquid hangs inside an elaborate pod- or womb-shaped structure composed of alternating strings of Buddhist prayer beads and wooden abacus balls suspended from a freestanding wooden support. The strands of prayer beads and abacus balls, which refer to humanity's spiritual and material impulses, form a kind of cage, inside of which one sees the glass globe reflecting an inverted, fish-eye image of the surrounding room. The piece imparts a peculiar sensation, as if the ordinary world has been turned inside out and upside down, miniaturized and captured within some kind of magical vessel. For Chen, the work was about a kind of double seeing, which is the essence of "transexperience"--the "real" world and its distorted double are visible simultaneously.

Several works deal with the differences between Eastern and Western medicine and, by extension, the incommensurability of Eastern and Western systems of thought. In a catalogue published by the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, where this work was first exhibited, Chen remarks to an interviewer, "As far as Western methods are concerned ... drugs are like a `fire brigade,' when there is a fire, they are able to `extinguish' it." Admitting that Chinese medicine is generally incapable of the quick fixes offered by Western medicine, he nonetheless extolled its more holistic approach, noting that its "main principle is to take care of the human body and the mind at the same time." As a result, "health does not mean the absence of disease, but a way of living in a certain equilibrium." (3)

As his immune system became less able to stave off illness, such issues became very pressing for Chen. In his last years he underwent various Western pharmacological treatments; at the same time, he was studying to become a doctor of Chinese medicine. His work began to reflect the contradictory visions of the human body offered by these two traditions. In Crystal Landscape of Inner Body (2000), he created a set of beautifully crafted glass sculptures of human organs, rendered slightly larger than life size. These were displayed scattered over a glass and iron table meant to recall an examination table from a doctor's consulting room. Isolated and removed from their context, the organs lost all quality of being part of a larger system. In this, they presented a striking image of the fragmented vision of the human body fostered by Western medicine.

Inner Body Landscape (2000) offered a counter proposition inspired by a more Chinese sensibility. In this piece, five internal organs are realized as latticework structures made with candles. The organs, each of which is a different color, suggest matchstick constructions or the girders in a half-finished building. However, the candles out of which they have been created conjure elemental phenomena such as heat, light and, perhaps, Qi. The organs rest on iron pedestals and abut each other, creating a snaking abstract landscape marked by undulating hills, valleys and mountains. In this work it is hard to identify specific organs, aside from the pair of yellow mounds at one end that appear to represent lungs. Unlike the crystal organs, these candle sculptures comprise a single whole, suggesting a vision of the body as an interconnected system.