Zheng Guogu at Vitamin Creative Space

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Christopher Phillips

The enthusiasm expressed in the Chinese art world for the work of Zheng Guogu, a 35-year-old artist who lives in the southern coastal town of Yangjian, always puzzled me. Encountering occasional examples of his seemingly tossed-off paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations, I imagined him as a rather directionless provincial dilettante. Seeing this exhibition, "My Home Is Your Museum," a survey of 10 years' work, I realized that I had been completely wrong.

Meticulously installed by the artist, the show spilled through a succession of rooms laid out to recall a Chinese garden, with a pathway of teal-colored tiles winding through expanses of light gray gravel. Greeting the visitor at the entrance and establishing the show's offbeat mood was Me and My Teacher (1997). This mural-size color photograph presents Zheng and a disheveled street person squatting together on a sidewalk and roaring with conspiratorial laughter. You then crossed a wooden bridge that arched over Subversive Sea (2001-04), an expansive floor installation of crumpled sheets of drawing paper bearing heavy calligraphic markings. Beneath the piles of paper lay hidden an array of electric foot massagers, their vibrations setting the "sea" in cartoonish, jiggling motion.

In addition to oddball sculptural objects covered in dripped white wax and an enormous painting of kickboxers made in collaboration with Zheng's students at the art academy in Zhuhai, the exhibition contained many examples of the early photo works for which he remains best known outside of China. The Various Life of Yanjiang Youth (1996), for example, comprises 16 color photos that show the artist's teenage brother and friends reenacting wild fight scenes from Hong Kong action movies. This work provided the key to an otherwise enigmatic assortment of clay sculptures that were on view near the show's entrance. These 10 groups of battling figures--commissioned by Zheng from a local sculptor adept at the official propaganda style of the 1960s--are remarkable for the verve with which they conjure up a storm of flailing fists and crumpling bodies.

Zheng's penchant for unpredictable collaborations was underscored by the presence of a small printed card offering a 1-yuan coin plated in chromium by the artist (an act of illegal currency-tampering in China) to anyone who furnishes him with a usable idea for an artwork. To judge by this exhibition, though, Zheng has no lack of genuinely quirky ideas of his own. His work seems ready for a much wider audience.