The world of Chen Zhen showing at the “Pirelli HangarBicocca” in Milan

Art understood as a cure and purification from illness, the interdependence between material and spiritual, the clash-encounter between Eastern and Western expressiveness, reflection on globalization versus tradition. The contemporary world is at the center of the artistic investigation of Chen Zhen, the great artist born in Shanghai and then moved to Paris, whose works are at the center of the ‘Short-Circuits’ retrospective, at the accessible museum “Pirelli HangarBicocca” in Milan.

The accessible exhibition, curated by Vicente Todolì and open from 15 October to 21 February 2021, is composed of over twenty large-scale installations created in the last 10 years of his career until the artist’s death in 2000. Thus in the large spaces of the former Milanese industrialists it is today it is possible to visit a path that includes works, such as ‘Jue Chang, Dancing Body-Drumming Mind (The Last Song)’ created to be “activated” with gestures such as percussion and the touch of the skins, and others that invite reflection on the theme of consumerism such as the majestic ‘Fu Dao / Fu Dao, Upside-Down Buddah / Arrival at Good Fortune’.

Among the works exhibited, there is also the “Round Table”, a work created for the United Nations Palace in Geneva: here 29 chairs are fixed to the round table, symbolizing on the one hand the meeting and harmony between cultures on the other, the impossibility of dialogue.

At this time when the world is in turmoil and awaiting the developments of the pandemic, we cultivate art and its value as a cure, openness to dialogue and knowledge. COVID will not take away the pleasure of admiring beauty, of learning about new cultures and opening our minds.

written by #giorgiarocchetti