Impossible is Nothing – and so it begins as a proposition, a challenge, a provocative yet ambiguous clue (as title) to the most recent solo project of conceptual rogue-artist Xu Zhen at Long March Space. As a verbal pun ‘Impossible is Nothing’ sets the tone for the kinds of questions this exhibition raises - what are the psychological and ethical boundaries between exploitation and willful participation? How are ideas of labor tested or accepted when considered in terms of context and site specificity? To what end does an artist’s intent have the right to inflict a repetitive act on a child’s innocence, powerless to object?

This exhibition consists of two ambitious new large-scale works, ‘Decoration’ and ‘The Starving of Sudan’. It is this latter piece that has been met with the most vocal public reaction. This performance installation takes its subject and visual frame from the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph taken by South African photographer Kevin Carter in 1994. Shot in famine-stricken Sudan, this image shows a vulture lurking in the rear, its eyes fixed on a young Sudanese baby, waiting for it to die.

Xu Zhen has recreated this scene in ‘The Starving of Sudan’. Walking into the brightly lit room (moving out of the dense darkness of ‘Decoration’) you are immediately confronted by the heat and smell of organic matter where a tiny living memory is re-enacting/performing this horrific moment. It is quite apparent that this piece hits an intrinsic human nerve - hearing the sudden rapid intake of breath or seeing the hands that flutter to the mouths of those who stumble into the gallery - providing testament to a kind of universal understanding of self-worth. After receiving the Pulitzer, Carter subsequently rose to the top of journalism fame overnight, only to be found two months later, dead in Johannesburg, from self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning. It is said he was a highly competitive man who craved professional recognition, whose death was mired in a guilt conscience heavily exacerbated by the press who soon came to question the ethical difference between voyeurism and journalism (argued in his leaving the scene without knowing the fate of the child). It is this dark side of ‘truth’ and ‘conscience’ that Xu Zhen prods, confronts and willfully, perhaps sadistically inserts his own artistic practice.

Xu Zhen’s art has always tested ideas of assumption and human limits, however in ‘Impossible is Nothing’ he controversially challenges and implicates his own artistic profession as possible farce. What, quite ironically, saves it from pure spectacle are the subjects he forces his viewers, and indeed himself, to confront. By manipulating the platform of art at his disposal, perhaps seeking some kind of reconciliation with his own involvement in a visual system of knowledge that is in many ways vacuous and superficial, he surreptitiously plants a question in everyone’s mind of the meaning of contemporary art, and its ability to provoke our own understanding of passive participation in the world’s chronic illnesses.