Zhu Weibing & Ji Wenyu
Zhu Weibing, Ji Wenyu | People holding flowers (detail) 2007 | The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2008 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery.
Zhu Weibing
b.1971 Heilongjiang, China
Ji Wenyu
b.1959 Shanghai, China
Live and work in Shanghai, China
Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu have been making textile-based sculptures together since 2003. Their delicately balanced works owe much to Zhu’s training as a fashion designer and art professor, while Ji worked previously as a painter, incorporating a critical take on Western Pop art in particular. In their soft sculptures, the artists comment on consumerism and social aspirations in post-Cultural Revolution China. With People holding flowers 2007, the artists have selected a subject that contains potent symbolism for Chinese culture, recalling Chairman Mao’s dictum which preceded the bloody purges of his Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. Using the flowers’ symbolism, the artists contrast the de-individualising effects of mass consumption with the subservience of the individual to the state under communism. With this work, Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu take up the significant legacies of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, applying their perceptions to an era of collective consumerism.
Exhibitions (solo): ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2006, 2007 and 2008. Exhibitions (group): ‘Red Hot: Asian Art Today’, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, United States, 2007.
Video
View Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu’s artist talk from the APT6 Opening weekend (part 1 of 2) (part 2 of 2)
