2022.11.10 Thursday 20:30
Location
53 Huangpu Road, Panorama Hotel, 28C Floor, Hongkou District, Shanghai.
Performer：Chen Zhou
The word "zang (脏)" in Mandarin means dirty, but its pronunciation is exactly the same as the word that means "true (真)" in Wenzhou dialect.
There is a saying that goes: "When you can smell shit, you are not far from the truth." This is the beautiful connection between "dirty"(脏zang) and "true", and this connection is achieved through renunciation. Perseverance has a good reputation, giving up, on the contrary, is "dirty"(脏zang). However, the "truth" often appears unexpectedly from the relief that comes after giving up. "In the crowd once and again, I look for her in vain. When all at once I turn my head, I find her there where lantern light is dimly shed. "
A loud fart, stinky, but amusing. That's the moment of love. The eternal truth echoes in the laughter that requires no explanation.
Program:
I: A love joke
II: Fear meditation
III: cliche-clear shit-truth
IV: Fake magic show
V: The taste of sweetness
VI: Drinking or dancing
Chen Zhou (b. 1987, China) currently lives and works in Shanghai.
His early works center on the spiritual predicaments in contemporary life and try to respond to and deconstruct them humorously and absurdly. From 2022, Chen turned internally to human spiritual force and sentience. Specializing in abstract narrative cinematic images, paintings, and writing.
Chen creates tranquil and intuitive scenarios that seek to provoke the viewers into introspection by capturing a vague gap between the lived experience of reality and the trance of void. He likens it to the trigger of an inner mirror.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
