Lot 192: *ZHENG, LIANJIE (Beijing 1962) Huge Explosion: Binding the Lost Soul Digital Print 5/15. 150 x 99 cm

Name: *ZHENG, LIANJIE (Beijing 1962) Huge Explosion: Binding the Lost Soul Digital Print 5/15. 150 x 99 cm
Brand: Koller Auctions
SKU: w9ysm1klr1

Est: CHF 13,000 - CHF 16,000

Koller AuctionsZurich, SwitzerlandJune 23, 2007

Item Overview

Description

ZHENG, LIANJIE
(Beijing 1962)
Huge Explosion: Binding the Lost Soul
Digital Print 5/15. Signed.
150 x 99 cm

Artist or Maker

Lianjie Zheng

Notes

Zheng Lianjie belongs to the generation of Chinese artists
most shaped by the harshness and excess of the Cultural
Revolution, when all but the most basic of educational facilities
were shut down by the authorities. The lack of formal
education during this period led to a factory job, but
ten years later in 1986 Zheng founded one of the .rst night
schools of .ne art in Beijing. It was shortly thereafter in
1990 that Zheng''s attention turned to the Great Wall as a
backdrop for what has come to be considered among the
most seminal performance works in post-Tiananmen (June
4th 1989) China.
Between September 21 and October 7 of 1993, Zheng created
a series of four performances held at the Great Wall,
near Si Ma Tai, in Hebei Province. Collectively titled Binding
the Lost Souls, the four pieces - Memory Loss, Black
Cola, Cavern-Strategy and Huge Explosion - took six months
of preparation and the recruitment of several score of local
residents, students and friends to complete. For Huge
Explosion Zheng and his collaborators gathered more than
10,000 broken bricks over a .ve-day period from along the
foot of the wall, wrapping them and themselves in strips
of red cloth. The wrapped bricks were piled along a 300
meter stretch of the wall, passing through three of the .re
towers. The funerary signi.cance of the colour red, which
Gao Minglu, curator of The Wall, refers to as ''A sacri.cial colour
for calling and commemorating the lost soul,'' was now
used to wrap the Great Wall itself. As Zheng says, ''The brick
is a piece of frozen history. What we are doing is to bind and
compress the lost soul at the sunset.'' Gao Minglu elaborates:
''The series of works involved certain ritual forms, but
instead of celebrating the greatness of the physical form of
the Wall, it seemed they were performing a cultural funeral
in calling back the souls lost by people in the current reality
The Wall thus became a ''wounded'' Great Wall in need of
reconstruction and revival.''

Auction Details

Juni 2007

Koller Auctions

June 23, 2007, 10:00 AM EST

Hardturmstrasse 102, Zurich, 8031, CH

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