Notes
Zheng Guogu's art is about the apotheosis of the ordinary objects and everyday subjects he encounters in his native Yangjiang. A coastal manufacturing city in western Guangdong province known for producing knives, Yangjiang provides continual inspiration to Zheng. And while local attributes come across in his works, he successfully turns this third-tier city into a metaphor for the "other" urban China writ large--away from the brand-name malls and cafes of Beijing and Shanghai, full of motorcycles and open-air markets, bustling with the energy of a country on the make. After graduating from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1992, Zheng spent one more year in that bustling city and then decided, for his health and spirit, to return to his hometown. His works from this period speak to the situation in this peripheral locale--fabricated tableaux of bored kinds making trouble around town ("The Lives of Yangjiang Youth") or sentimentalized wedding portraits in the then-popular vernacular style ("My Honeymoon). In retrospect, some of these series appear shoddily fabricated, but they speak to an early moment in experimental photography in China, as artists first began to play with the theatrical possibilities of the camera. They also capture the strange realities of a moment, and a place, where economic development was reworking a society. As the curator Hou Hanru has written, "Zheng belongs to a generation that grew up with Coca-Cola, Kung Fu movies, pop music, and TV games. Different from those older generation in the uncertainty of Cultural Revolution of the 70s, and in the optimistic Utopia of the 80s, there is no ideology and idealization among the new generation. They pursue happiness and amuse themselves; their life style and thoughts are more realistic and open. Artists of this generation do not have any burden of history, and have gotten out of the prison of ideology." Toward the end of the 1990s, Zheng Guogu's oeuvre grew more complex as he began a series of paintings based on the Hong Kong celebrity gossip magazines that came across the porous border with this Special Administrative Region. These magazines were widely available on the streets of Yangjiang, albeit a few months after their original publication date. This series, "Computer Controlled by Pig's Brain," (Lot 1019) turns these news items into subjects for paintings in a variety of forms and materials, some embroidered onto green pool-table velvet, others stenciled onto Chinese rice paper. Read closely, the texts track the comings and goings of movie stars and pop singers. They are rendered in a uniform format that Zheng Guogu derived based on his work as a graphic designer. These works, like his later photographic series "150 Ten Thousand Customers" [The Estella Collection, Lot 1179 ] which flew in the face of art-photography editioning practice by mandating the printing of an ideal total of 10,000 copies of the same photograph (albeit each actually unique in its composition) aim to achieve permanence through repetition, inscribing the ordinary repeatedly into art. The impetus for this series of photographs was Hans van Dijk, the legendary curator of the China Art Archives and Warehouse who brought Zheng Guogu's work from the periphery into the center of the Beijing conversation. With a foothold in Beijing, Zheng went on to participate in the landmark underground exhibition Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion, curated by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun in the basement of a Beijing residential compound in January 1999. For this exhibition, which placed an emphasis on the "on-site nature" (xianchang gan) of the works it displayed, Zheng hired two models through a local agency and charged them with frying toy tanks in batter and oil (Lot 1020). (Only later would the work be brought to the market, with eight separate tanks each in an edition of ten.) Coming at a moment of heightened nationalism leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic later that year, this piece--at once performance and sculpture--highlighted the strange web of connections among female beauty, militancy, and Chinese cuisine. Around the turn of the millennium, Zheng Guogu decided to commemorate this massive chronological milestone with a series of sculptures based on ordinary household containers. Titled "Rust Another Thousand Years" [The Estella Collection, Lot 1178], the series plays on a homophone in Chinese between the word "to rust, corrode," and "to put on a show." (That word, xiu, is itself derived from the English "show.") By permanently casting disposable bottles in iron, bronze, and copper, Zheng argues that, in his words, "everything is a show, and every era has its own commodities." Read another way, this observation becomes a pithy commentary on art world itself. "If you look closely," Zheng Guogu notes, "you see that these bottles are different today even from how they were in 2000." Hyper-conscious of how aesthetic trends are today as disposable as the most basic goods, Zheng here sets out to memorialize the mundane as a way of engaging with the sublime. Painting for Zheng Guogu works as what he calls "the best way to strengthen an impression, to make people remember things." This documentary impulse is behind both of the Zheng Guogu paintings presently offered--TV Journey Number 9 [The Estella Collection, Lot 1180] and Rebuilding He Xiangning Art Museum (Lot 1018). Both date to 2003. The former, completed with and co-signed by his younger cousin Yang Shun, comes from a digital photograph taken of a Time magazine cover during the SARS outbreak of early 2003 as shown on an evening news broadcast. This painting of a television image of a magazine cover is thus several layers removed from the reality of the epidemic it speaks of. Like the rest of the TV Journey series, it puts into question the relationship between the human mind and the media by which it is fed. Rebuilding He Xiangning Art Museum works in a similarly complex, if more concretely "artistic" manner, offering documentation of an installation project that Zheng Guogu realized as part of The Fifth System, a sculpture exhibition curated by Hou Hanru and Pi Li in Shenzhen in late 2003. For that exhibition, Zheng endeavored to reconstruct the He Xiangning Museum of Art at actual size, resorting to a sparse bamboo framework when he ran out of money and materials to fabricate the building in its true form. In this painting, he sanctifies an image of that fleeting project by committing it to canvas, insuring that it--like the plastic bottles and newspapers that populate his earlier oeuvre--will not fade from memory or view.
