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Fu
Dao / Fu Dao
"upside-down Buddha / arrival at good fortune"
August 4 - September 5, 1997 |
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The
Project Gallery presents a site-specific installation by Chen Zhen.
Instruction:
1. 6 round metal tubes construct a temple like structure which is
about 380 cm high:
2. On the level of 300 cm of this structure, some ten found objects
are suspended: fragments of car, televisions, refrigerators, and any
kind of ready-made objects.
3. At the in-between spaces of this "suspended funeral",
all the objects will be linked and woven by many small bamboo like
a "roof" of temple, a "floating body" of the sediments
and a "relic" or "avatars" from Heaven.
4. Some fifty Buddha statues are suspended in upside-down in the middle
of the temple.
Concept:
In spring 1993, after 8 years of living and working in the west, I
came back to China for the first time for experiencing the tremendous
changes, and trying to realize the actual mutation and the future
tendency in Asia through a city like Shanghai.
After frequent visits with observations and inspirations from such
an amassing area, with conceiving and realizing my projects in the
different Asian countries, I found that this Oriental world has not
only already taken shape economically and politically as a energetic
bloc which contends with the Europe and America and which decentralizes
incontestably, but also creates quickly a very intensive "central
territory of eastern-western conflict" in terms of culture. In
other words, we should, as an Asian artist, not only make the movements
in the West for proving the existence of differences and hybrids in
order to question or disclose the colonialist root of western-centralism
and to create "my world" in the West, but also should be
conscious that actual Asia is just "the biggest center of conflict
between the East and the West".
In winter 1995, when I came into a restaurant in Shanghai, I saw
a strange thing: A big Chinese word "good fortune" was put
in upside-down on the door. I asked what's happened. "You shouldn't
look at the word, but read it" a friend said. Then, I understood
suddenly: the pronunciation of the word, "upside-down Fu"
is the same as "arrival of Fu" The project "Fu Dao
/ Fu Dao" interrogates:
How functions the oriental tradition of "getting wealth" which
mixes with and echoes through the different folk convention, the
super- stitious belief and religious ritual in the recent western
materialized society ?
What's the relationship and meaning in today's Asia between the Buddha
and divinity or money, or politics and power, otherwise and spirituality
?
In which way the Asian people will construct our own modern society,
contemporary culture and particular political system in such a background
where the omnipresence of Buddha and the confusion between the spirit
of dematerialization and the obsession of prosperity ?
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