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Du Zhenjun initiated his artistic practice in China before discovering the potential of new media at the Fine Arts School of Rennes at the end of the 90s. Some theoreticians and other curators, among whom Edmond Couchot, Pierre Bongiovanni and Richard Castelli, allowed him to exhibit his work in different French and then European art centers. Lately, this Chinese artist who lives in France, started to exhibit between Shanghai and Beijing his interactive video installations, revealing the complexity of human nature.

Globe Fire
If Du Zhenjun often allows us to act on the image, sometimes he also allows us to penetrate it. Thus, the video image covering the dome of the installation Globe Fire encourages us to penetrate inside of it. Inside the image there are gas emissions that only catch fire if a real flame is put next to them. Flags that look like pieces of fabric that some would use to enslave others appearing. But the experience, here, is collective, because several people are needed to be able to light the 12 flames that will set ablaze all the world’s flags. Erasing the symbols that, too often, are a source of conflict, can only be accom¬plished as the result of a collective action, in this period where globali¬zation is rekindling forgotten resent¬ments.

The Tower Of Babel
As it should be, The Tower Of Babel is big. A device located at the base of this arrogant architecture measures our temperatures, while a machine adds them up. The language of numbers, as with that of machines, is universal.

One after the other, visitors participate here again in the collective experience of switching on, with their body heat, their parcel of the tower. And that’s how values that translate intimate data are diluted into collective memory. But it’s necessary to wait for the total illumination of the tour, for the ray of light to finally shoot up, and lose itself in the sky, braving divine anger above.

The End Has No End
Beijing Olympic Games had to start at 8.08PM on the 8th August 2008, which didn’t fail to inspire Du Zhenjun. That’s how, lately, he “mistreated” his models forcing them to move forward in very uncomfortable positions – without ever getting up – while he shot them. In order for these creatures in primitive postures to follow each other in innumerable video monitors, all drawing a monumental structure, without beginning nor end, to look like an eight symbolizing prosperity. However, the artists allows us, once again, to act upon the images that generate the sounds. A clap of the hands and this colony of creatures, forced by an desire for prosperity, starts moving back. Taking just a few steps before going back, towards unreachable things.

Sharkman
SharkMan is not his first image related to the experimentation of the hybridization between men and animals. However, it seems that the artist has radicalized his approach a bit by choosing a shark, an animal that has a bad reputation with men. But the audience is here again invited to decide, because, this time it can, by lightly touching the image, make the nude, partially immersed human body which covers the screen, bleed. The caress then becomes a bite and the blood flows, the consequence of what wasn’t meant to be an aggressive gesture. Are we sharks for others while our caresses, sometimes, are not?

Human Cage
Du Zhenjun enjoys representing himself in his works, as he does in Human Cage. He shows himself dislocated, one hand here, the other one there, the head separated from the chest. There is a space between the inflatable modules, covered by the video images of pieces of his own body. The artist, by the name he gives to this work, evokes our capa¬city to shut somebody in as we shut ourselves in. Trapped in our certain¬ties, we progressively disappear. It is really about disappearance here, as the packaging of the body, piece by piece, generally precedes its disse¬mination. Would the artist be ready to fight with human nature? Nothing is less certain, as it is at the center of his preoccupations.
DOMINIQUE MOULON

+INFO:
< www.duzhenjun.com >

Published in the Digitalarti Mag #1.

Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.

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