Zhou Zixi
Born in 1970,lives and works between Shanghai and Valencia.Since 1994 he has pursued an artistic practice that probes myths of ethnic origins,collective memory and amnesia,the alienation of the individual,crises and contemporary events.Recognised as one of the very few “history painters” in contemporary China.Zhou constructs a distinctive visual epic-at once poetic and analytical-charged with narrative tension.
His paintings interweave historicity with complex systems of symbols.Moving between the monumental and the minute,the mythic and the everyday,the present and the past,human and non-human,he explores how politics infiltrate the body,how catastrophe permeates daily life,and how the collective shapes the individual.This dense interplay generates a forest of temporal,imagistic and verbal metaphors.
Zhou conceives his oeuvre as a single vast architectural model that echoes the built environment,allowing each work to resonate with and reflect upon the others.Through thin,rapid brushwork-layering,erasing,smearing-he produces a sense of weighty immersion,a visual field of blurring,dislocation and fragmentation.His painterly touch is not merely a stylistic choice but a language in its own right,capturing fleeting emotional scenes,and giving form to time,memory,history and existence.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
”A Stranger Called ZHOU Zixi”, 33 Contemporary Art Center, Guangzhou (2024); “Ensemble”, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2023); “Promised Land”, Tsutaya Books, Shanghai (2021); “The Longing the Distant Worlds Aroused Spoke More to the Home Than to Anything Unknown”, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai (2021); “Spring Outing in Xiaogang”, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2015); “One Afternoon…”, ShanghART Gallery, Singapore (2014); “Late Spring and Early Summer”, ShanghART Gallery, Beijing (2011); “China 1946-1949”, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai (2008); “Interiors”, BüroFriedrich, Berlin, Germany (2006); “Happy Life”, BizART, Shanghai (2005); “Sorry, I don’t know”, BizArt, Shanghai (2004).
Recent group exhibitions include:
“Advent: Inventing Landscape, Producing the Earth”, Qianshao Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai (2019); “Side Lanes”, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2019); “Why Not Ask Again?”, 11th Shanghai Biennale, PSA, Shanghai (2016); “China 8, Contemporary Art from China at the Rhine and Ruhr”, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2015); 1st Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine (2012); “China Power Station – Part 4”, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino, Italy (2010); “China Power Station: Part II”, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007).
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