2005.11.26– 2005.12.02
BizArt Centre, 4th Floor, Building 7, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai

From November 26 to December 2, Shanghai BizArt Centre will present Zhou Zixi’s solo exhibition Happy Life, showcasing the artist’s latest oil paintings.

Within the fields of video, installation, performance, and new media that dominate the current art scene, the traditional easel painting format has long been marginalized and seldom appears in exhibitions. Zhou Zixi’s new exhibition, entirely consisting of easel paintings, has therefore raised new expectations for Shanghai’s art community.

Following his 2002 solo exhibition Sorry, I Don’t Know, Happy Life is Zhou Zixi’s first major solo presentation after a three-year silence. Happy Life continues his consistent concern with social and historical themes, presenting visual metaphors of everyday life infiltrated by the mechanisms of power. Landscapes tainted with hints of corruption and satire, scenes of fleetingly fashionable outdoor exercise turned into absurd spectacles of violence, and the indifference, repression, concealment, and erasure of reality—all of these are captured in Zhou’s paintings. For Zhou, pain is but a trivial instrument, while entertainment encompasses everything, including suffering. For historical events that have already passed yet continue to affect us, Zhou deliberately paints them in a light, even frivolous manner, as a way of avoiding solemnity: not to forget, but to deliberately dilute, to present madness with a sense of detachment, to confront repression with parody.

Unlike his earlier works with their heavy, sombre tones, Zhou continues to employ irony in this exhibition, but with an even sharper, more absurd edge, turning biting critique into playful ridicule. His ironic take on Happy Life seems to coincide perfectly with the contemporary slogan: “Entertainment is paramount, even above life and death.”