HUMAN NATURE REVEALED
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 recovering the dome of
the installation Globe Fire encourages us to penetrate inside of it.
Inside the image there are gas emissions that only catches fire if a
real flame is put next to them. Flags looking like pieces of fabric
that some use to enslave others are appearing. But the experience here,
is collective because people need to be several to be able to lit the
12 flames that will set ablaze all the world’s flags. Erasing the
symbols that oppose us too often, can only be the result of a
collective action in this period of globalization that makes old
resentments reappear.
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 temperature while a
machine adds them. The number language, as the machines one, is
universal. One after the other, visitors participate here again to a
collective experience switching on, with their body heat, their parcel
of the tour. And that’s how the values translating the intimate data
dilute in a 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 at the risk of provoking some divine angers.
The End Has Non 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 he lately
“mistreated” his models imposing them to move forward in very
uncomfortable positions – without ever getting up – while he was
shooting them. In order for these creatures with primitive postures to
follow each other in innumerable video monitors drawing a monumental
structure, without beginning nor end, looking like an eight symbolizing
prosperity. However, the artists allowed us once again to act on the
images generating sounds. A clap of the hands and this colony of
creatures forced by an equal desire of prosperity started moving back.
Only walking a few steps before going back towards unreachable things.
Sharkman
SharkMan is not his first image related experimentation of the
hybridization between men and animals. However it seems that the artist
radicalized 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 touching lightly the image, make the nude
human body bleed, which, partially immersed covers the screens. The
caress then becomes a bite and the blood the consequence of what didn’t
mean to be an aggressive gesture. Are we sharks for the others while
our caress, sometimes, are not?
Human Cage
Du Zhenjun enjoys representing himself in his works like 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 this own
body. The artist, by the name he gives to this work, evokes our
capacity to shut somebody in as we shut ourselves up. Trapped in our
certainties, we progressively disappear. It is really about
disappearance here as the packaging of the body, piece by piece,
generally precedes its dissemination. Would the artist be ready to
fight with the human nature? Nothing is less certain as it is the
center of his preoccupations.
Dominique Moulon
Website: www.duzhenjun.com
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