"Everything can be art, art is everything." —Zheng Guogu
A gifted conceptual artist at ease working across multiple media, Zheng Guogu’s practice reflects the intimate relationship between contemporary society and media. Zheng Guogu was born in Yangjiang, in the southwest corner of Guangdong province, a town best known for its knife and scissor factories. As a student he became part of the Big Tail Elephant Group, an art collective which critiqued the environmental and social problems caused by rapid modernisation.
Sewing for Another Two Thousand Years No. 28 greets the viewer like a digital billboard, with fragments of text from well-known advertising slogans or passages assembled from magazines, tabloids and the Internet. The title refers to the length of time taken for steel items to fully disintegrate, a comment on the role of commodity culture within China’s fast expanding economy, and its complicated relationship to China’s millennia-old history.
