XU ZHEN®: Zoning Out

ShanghART Shanghai is honored to present XU ZHEN®’s solo exhibition “Zoning Out” on Nov.8, 2022, featuring XU ZHEN®’s latest painting series, “Passion”. This series continues Xu’s interests in various propositions including new technologies, excess knowledge and information, human intellectual evolution, as well as his constant exploration of the diversity of creative media. This exhibition is a highly sensitive and brand-new expansion of the artist’s visual creation in the context of the post-global era.

“Zoning Out” is a brand new scene created for the “SIGNAL” project. Viewers will enter a hall full of paintings. All the paintings are firing messages excitedly, cutting the viewer’s gaze. “In the age of the Internet, people are zoning out on the phone incessantly. Everything is considered impermanent. Therefore, there are countless crossroads of action that lead to everywhere, no idea what will come about next moment.” – “Zoning Out” is a celebration and a rehearsal of this reality. In the “Passion” paintings, each work is such a crossroads. The swiping fingers on the screen are of the same nature as the flurry of brushes on the canvas – they are both confident, greedy, and blind. The artist uses the brushes like a severe phone user to find new possibilities and directions in it.

The exhibition works as a physical presentation of the contemporary art project “SIGNAL” initiated by Xu Zhen. The artist gives as a gift one of his “Passion” paintings to the global audience, and each recipient is invited to display the painting they receive on their social media accounts. A long-term, unceasing “art exhibition” will thus take place on Internet media platforms. The project has landed in Indonesia, Singapore, and China since 2022. It aims to send the signal of art to people around the world and share with them the future of art.