Page 93 - Art Review

selected by Venus Lau

Venus Lau is artistic director at K11 Art Foundation. She is based in Shanghai

Born in Zhejiang province in 1987 and currently based in Shanghai, smiley-faced emojis, rethinking the notion of yellow being a global
Chen Zhou works mainly with installation and video. A hallmark signifier of general happiness. Underlying his inclination towards
of Chen’s videoworks is the way he sees and treats colour – he has a this particular colour is an interest in laughter, which Henri Bergson
penchant for spreading a patch of symbolic colour across the video saw as ‘in need of an echo’. As a form of social suspense and a void of
frame, as if a lighting gel has been superimposed over the picture. meaning, laughter rebuilds the narrative space.
By doing so, Chen blurs the visual depths in his moving images, Chen’s enthusiasm is explicated by the exhibition titled after the
generating a visual flatness that contrasts with their narrative late American comedian Andy Kaufman (Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai,
progression (which takes influence from literary writers such as 2014). After spending several years on scriptwriting in a rural area
Milan Kundera and Raymond Carver). with limited Internet access, Chen has recently entered his ‘blue
The pervasive use of colours in Chen’s artworks is an indicator period’, ushered in by the appearance of Blue Hole (2017), a video in
of his research interest in common affective experiences. In his which the whole screen is flooded with a hue similar to that of the
‘yellow period’, for example, which included the exhibition I’m not so-called ‘blue screen of death’ on the Micrcosoft Windows oper-
not not Chen Zhou (Magician Space, Beijing, 2013) and his presentation ating system. Staring at the video for a while, one could discern in
at ON | OFF, a survey show of young Chinese artists (Ullens Center it visual depths evocative of Sinofuturism – a neologistic term to
for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013), he often utilised everyday suggest the examination of the archaeology of the future in non-
objects and icons of the bright, warm colour, including bananas and Western contexts.

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