Cultural Collisions, Playful Associations: Interview with XU ZHENⓇ

Much like an app, XU ZHENⓇ could be said to be a product of iterative design, cycling through numerous updates to branding and function. As a teenager, he attended the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Institute. Upon graduating, he moved to Beijing to explore the burgeoning art scene. Instead, he hung out with musicians and spent more time talking about art than making anything. A year later, he was back in Shanghai working for a design firm. He began making videos because it was cheap, and soon enough, by 1999, he was curating exhibitions. By 2000, he had formed BizArt, one of the few non-profit art centers in China. It offered various services and put the earnings back into one of the more experimental art galleries in the country. At 27, he was already featured in the Shanghai Biennale, and the following year his early video work Shouting (1998) was included in the China Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. 

• China