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::: MUSIQUES et CULTURES DIGITALES :DU ZHENJUN
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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Digital Art
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