Chen Zhen - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

natural, active element of the site, but also as the memory of the artist's personalexperience, when he came six years ago for "Paroles d'artistes", a colloquium with ascore of artists chaired by Jan Hoet, when a surprise spate flooded the place. To thiscan be added childhood memories of bathing in springs, by which the Chinese setgreat store, and the importance of water in Chinese artistic culture.Water has a dual dimension in this work: it washes the objects from everyday lifebrought together in the eleven saturated and encumbered beds representing theorgans of the body. The objects are formative and informative. Water brings themback to life, leaving in suspense the threat of their loss. Time, too, is double: for 15minutes the water flows, then it stops for 15 minutes, leaving the beds to becomecalm lakes, revealing the pictorial composition of the objects they contain, which ispropitious to inner silence, offering an escape from the turnult of frenzied action thatcharacterises our lives today.Another temporal indication is given by the unlimitedness of water, which is naturallyflowing, and by the limits of the figured body that receives it, a body that isorganic, mental, social. And again: the circulation of flows between beings andthings.Resonance: almost musically absorbing the echo of the context, integrating andtransferring it elsewhere. Getting mental images, metaphors, to move from one cultureto another, mixing and bringing them together, making meaning move aroundlike a sound, from one edge to another. Transmitting experiences from one individualto another, from one culture to another, sharing vitality. The friendly sharing andsensory resonance of an artistic project and experience lived by Chen Zhen and thosewho work with him. Inter-subjectivities interacting. The Jardi" tavotr brings intoplay metaphors of life and death, stages of life. We made our contribution to it at thevery moment when these terms had lost all abstraction, in what for my friend, companionin life and work, was physically and mentalJy a critical situation; a grave illness.We began to hope that the work would give us the strength to resist.Resistance: Chen Zhen accepts misunderstanding as a fecund part of the exchangebetween cultures, or persons. A matter of cultural resistance. Chen Zhen preserves hisChinese identity while abscrbing, by experience, all the cultures he passes through.And that is fairly emblematic of the new modes of exchange. These are the methodsused by art to mix its blood, to transform itself.There is no hierarchybetween the sensible and the intelligible, no hierarchy betweenartistic genres, types of objects. content and form. A real determination to not reducediversity and to go beyond rationality and the categories it forms. To schclt the mindso that it may exist in a society that represents itself and acts in the medium of thetechnical. There is an underlying political dimension here.The instituting of differences and hierarchies lies at the heart of the artistic system,especially in institutions; in the West. This corresponds to a separation between bodyand soul, emotion and understanding, bottom and top, high and low, the individual33