“Psychological need or biological fact? Social reality or lived assumption? Historical fact or mediated fi ction?” These are just a few of the non-audacious innuendos and punch lines that accompany the introduction to “Impossible is Nothing,” Xu Zhen’s solo show in Beijing. This laconic title, appropriated from Adidas’ Olympic slogan and translated from the original Chinese, places the viewer once again amid the artist’s provocative queries and mediated truths; yet no authorial reconciliation seems to be put in place here to rescue the intellectual wit from a silent joke.
Two large-scale pieces constitute the exhibition. Decoration (2008) is a darkened room where a partial life-size replica of a space station is suspended two meters from the ground, fl anked by a set of four videos that screen the activity of the two people that inhabit the spaceship, for as long as they can endure it.
Much more vocal controversy was inspired by The Starving of Sudan (2008), the adjacent environment where the viewer enters a reconstruction of the shocking scenario pictured by Pulitzer Price-winning photographer Kevin Carter, who tragically took his life shortly after the picture was taken in 1993. The carefully rendered view of the unsettling photograph (a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture) is made ‘live’ with a real half-naked African baby sitting center-stage while being preyed upon by the taxidermied predator among grass and dirt. The baby, and his attendant mother, immigrants to Guangzhou,
were reportedly compensated 1000 rmb per 5-hour daily show, over a period
of two weeks.
We are left reckoning what purpose is served here — the artist’s post-production records, a consciousness awakening, or a systemic challenge to the art world.

Beatrice Leanza