Xu Zhen: The Last Few Mosquitos

Xu Zhen is emerging as one of the most inventive young Chinese artists. His gestures in a wide range of media – sculpture, video, installation – are dramatic and knowing, breathtaking in their audacity, aesthetically and conceptually ambitious. Installation 8848–1.86 (2005) took the conquering of Mount Everest as its subject and included a sculptural interpretation of the mountain‘s summit inside a vast glass case.

Clichés of human ambition recur in Xu Zhen’s work, often with a sense of humour that tends to undermine assumptions of worth. What exactly is the point of reaching the top of Mount Everest? Likewise, 18 Days (2006) is a video work in which a military skirmish over national frontiers is re-enacted by the artist and friends, on location in northern China, playing around with toy tanks and other battle vehicles. The childish game we witness clearly raises questions about territorialism and a symptomatic resort to warfare. In another work Xu Zhen invokes the sublime by engraving an astronaut’s footprint on a grain of sand. Seen through the lens of a microscope, it is very reminiscent of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step or [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”.

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