Chen Zhiguang (b. 1963) makes two kinds of ant with stainless steel: the ant as a group creature so as to accentuate its collectivity; the ant as singular individuals, with each of the body details being augmented and sometimes even animated. To put clothes on these individualized ants and to animate them amount to making them deities, whose significance is similar to those local deities crucial to the Southern Fujian identity. Chen Zhiguang combines the characters of the ant with his own personality, yoking the worldliness of the images with the industrial characters of the medium. These works are of the “aesthetics of experience,” converting the artist’s own and contemporary Chinese experiences of survival into the looks of the ants and contemplating on the relationship between the ants and their surrounding environment. The ants can be individuals, as embodiments of Chen Zhiguang’s own personality, as a part of the collective whole, or as representatives of the Chinese people. In whichever variety, the ant reveals Chen Zhiguang’s strong desire to respect individuals, traditions, and lives. The stainless steel theater stage he has created has this inscription at the top: With Dignity. To a great extent, “with dignity” is synonymous with artistic representation: we must use the dignity in representation to call for and anticipate the possibility that every individual achieve dignity in the real life.
Comments by Curator Xu Gang
About the exhibition
Opening time: 4pm. 23 May, 2015
Duration: 2015.05.23 -- 2015.06.04
Location: 2nd floor exhibition hall of Building No.1, Today Art Museum
Courtesy of the artist and Today Art Museum, for further information please visit www.todayartmuseum.com.
