Zheng Guogu

His photographic work questions the post-Cultural Revolution generation's attitudes to the world around them and has used of contact sheets to make storyboard-like images. Guogu ives and works in Yangjiang, Guangdong province. He was the winner of the 2006 Chinese Contemporary Art Reward.

Zheng Guogu was born in 1970 in Yangjiang, in the southwest part of Guangdong province. Known for its knife and scissor factories, it is situated on the edge of the China South Sea. Yangjiang became a town in 1988 when farmers and others from the outlying rural areas were encouraged to move there to participate in a new economic enterprise zone. Zheng Guogu comes from an artistic family. His father is a traditional instrument maker and a singer, who has at times worked for the Hong Kong Opera, a five-hour drive east from Yangjiang. During the years that Zheng Guogu was growing up, things were already changing in China as the Maoist period receded into the past and the country opened up to the rest of the world. He and his generation had access to the West and Hong Kong through television, pirated CVDs of Hollywood films and computer games. So although he was physically isolated, he was accessing the West, albeit virtually, at a young enough age so as to take these new experiences and freedoms for granted. He attended the Guangdong Academy of Art in Guangzhou, China's third culture capital, with a focus on printmaking. While a student there, he was introduced to a slightly older group of artists that formed the Big Tail Elephant Group (Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Xu Tan and Liang Juhui) in 1991, and they encouraged the younger artist to experiment with performance and conceptual art.

Zheng Guogu is one among a growing number of postmodern artists who have been reacting to the rapid shifts taking place in China over the past ten years by giving artistic shape to the phases of social and economic transformation. What distinguishes him is his commitment to the local culture of his hometown and his role in directing attention to it, while engaging with trends in global contemporary art. The international art world has fallen in love with contemporary Chinese art, and somehow Zheng Guogu, although often included in group exhibitions in Asia and Europe, has not been singled out often enough. He juggles fact with fiction or myth, while controlling the entry points to his community for visitors from the art world, who make the trek to visit him in the small town where he lives and works.

Zheng Guogu's works in his "Through Popular Expression" display are the response of the artist to commercial trends. His work Computer controlled by pig's brain No. 59 belongs to his series Computer controlled by pig's brain (豬腦控制電腦). Put on the leatherette-canvas, the elements engender a corresponding 'fancy' effect. The Computer controlled by pig's brain series is a refraction of how the media is overflowing and stimulating our everyday life. In this series, Zheng uses different elements of Hong Kong pop-culture magazines, which address people's senses and their attraction to our consumerist branding culture. The M+ Museum has Computer controlled by pig's brain No. 44, one of the works in this series, in its permanent collection. • Illustration — Computer controlled by pig's brain No. 26 Sewing for Another Two Thousand Years is a textile work and part of his needlepoint series, in which traditional canvas painting incorporates elements resembling embroidered carpets or wallpaper.The One Hundred and Fifty 10,000 Customers series was created as an homage to Hans van Dijk, a Dutch curator who influenced contemporary Chinese art after 1985. The series also engages with the concept of producing works intended for large-scale distribution within the art market, theoretically consisting of multiple pieces.Each work consists of a grid of small photographs forming a larger image based on daily news imagery, often incorporating repeated visual elements such as motorcycles.

2019 Zheng Guogu: Visionary Transformation, MoMA PS1, New York 2016 Chinese Whispers, Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Bern, Switzerland Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, Guggenheim Museum, New York 2007 The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool, UK 2006 Through Popular Expression, The University of Central England in Birmingham, UK Take Down, Beijing Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland 2005 Out of Sight, Amsterdam Puzzle—It is from Yangjiang, Grace Alexander Contemporary Art Gallery, Switzerland Millennium, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2004 A l'ouest du sud de l'est, Center of Contemporary Art, Sète/Villa Arson in Nice, France From China, ICP International Center of Photography, New York My Home Is Your Museum, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou 2003 50th Biennale di Venezia, Venezia, Italy 2002 Paris-Pekin, Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris Are You Going to Enjoy Calligraphy or Measure Blood Pressure? Shanghai 2000 More Dimensional, Caaw, Beijing 2001 Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin Art Forum

• Guogu's piece titled "Ad, Rust For Another Two Thousand Years (set of 33, various sizes)"—auction results