Zheng Guogu "A Hundred Year Old Tree Blooms Again"
Chambers Fine Art
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Zheng Guogu is active as a photographer, painter, and performance artist and has gained a reputation as a conceptual provocateur. His early work documenting the youth culture of Yangjiang was photography based and disarmingly casual in approach, but since then he has widened his range of interests without moving away from Yangjiang.
"A Hundred Year Old Tree Blooms Again" is the development of ideas first explored in his ongoing project The Age of Empire in which Zheng Guogu negotiated the sale of land from a peasant and attempted to legalize the transaction. The current exhibition follows from beginning to end the sequence of events that led to the planting of a massive one hundred year old tree in the courtyard of Chambers Fine Art Beijing in September 2007. The negotiation and purchase, the long overland journey with the tree on a flat-bed truck, the precarious lowering into place in the courtyard, the skillful planting and wrapping by professional plants-men provides the subject-matter for photographs, videos and a new series of paintings.
The moment of truth – whether or not the tree survives – is rapidly approaching. If it does Christophe W. Mao remarks that it will be “a triumph for Zheng Guogu’s skills as a negotiator and a demonstration of his political canniness. It will become a famous tree, a rural immigrant to the big city like so many millions of Chinese although much bigger and older and at the same time a work of art by Zheng Guogu. It will be impossible to miss.”
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Schedule
from April 15, 2008 to May 31, 2008