Embracing Chaos 1.0

Now we are going to use this land reclaimed in the 1970s. It took over 30,000 people twelve months to work on over 1.4 million square meters of land, reclaim a 17-kilometer-long embankment, and fill over 2,600 hectares of fertile soil. This was the first local “ecological action” that took place in 1971. Over a short span of the past fifty years, the land has witnessed socialist land reclamation, collective agricultural life, and the establishment of the “new-era national ecological demonstration area”, among many other incidents.

Today, Xu Zhen airdrops himself here along with a dozen of his sculptures. They tear open the roof, rip through the grass, and pounce right into place. Landing here as if it were the moon, Xu Zhen wants to pick up the baton of recla- mation and invent landscape of his own.

MadeIn Art Museum will present “XU ZHEN®: Embracing Chaos 1.0” as its permanent display. In the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Museum, Xu Zhen launched this live art scene in 2021 where objects such as artifacts, ecology, collective memory, and myths are superimposed, agitated, constantly added in and nurtured.

During his career spanning over two decades, Xu Zhen has developed a new urbanist Pop action informed by Pop art practice and stirred up a new Pop formula in the process of China’s urbanization. From Xu Zhen Supermarket, Move- ment Field, Physique of Consciousness Museum, Base, to “Embracing Chaos 1.0” at the Museum in Chongming Island, the works of XU ZHEN® have been a ridicule and mockery of the dislocated aesthetics and ethics in the globalized cityscape. With his conceptual strength, XU ZHEN® constructs a new creative practice of contemporary art with an aesthetic interest in and ethical examination of the contemporary technology-landscape-commodity reality.