Zhou Xiaohu

Ethan Cohen Fine Arts is pleased to present Zhou Xiaohu’s first solo art exhibition in the US. The exhibition includes recent video and paintings. Zhou Xiaohu was born in 1960 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. In 1980 he entered the Suzhou Art Institute and studied sculpture for 3 years. He was later educated at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated in 1989 with a degree in oil painting. In 1997 Zhou Xiaohu first began working in video.

Zhou always loved film and animation as a child, and often created little figures in paper and clay. “I personally think that what I am doing today directly relates to what I did as a child” says Zhou, remembering how he used to make original dramas with his childhood friends. Later, during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, he realized that art could be a good career path. “I saw as a high school student that I could find freedom in art”.

In Zhou’s first solo exhibition, he presents four videos- "Crowd Around", 2003-2004 Animation video 11 minutes, "Utopian Machine", 2002 Animation video 8 minutes, "The gooey gentleman", 2002 Video 4 minutes 40 seconds, and "Conspiracy", 2004 Double screens Video 6 minutes 12 seconds. In addition to the videos, Zhou has made a new series of paintings that draws images from `the media. He portrays images of kidnappers in Iraq, protests in the streets, prostitutes, sexual harassment, Jiang Zemin and George W. Bush, and past curators of the Documenta.

The central piece of Zhou’s new video works is “Crowd Around” ten video dramas by Zhou Xiaohu, created during 2003-2005. Zhou has taken images from the media that have made a deep impression on him. He has created with small clay figures, ten mini vignettes: 1) King of the Box, 2) Clean off Eroticism, 3) 9/11, 4) Hold A Court (Saddam’s trial), 5) Assassin, 6) Safety Education, 7) Traffic Accident, 8) Procreate, 9) Electrocution, and 10) Temple. Zhou makes us more aware of how twisted the world is becoming by showing Saddam’s Trial in Iraq, a safety educational program staged on an airplane with a terrorist, an execution by the electric chair, 9/11 scenes, and the Prime Minister of Japan paying tribute to war dead from World War II. Zhou says “because of the overflow of information today in the media, the shocking actualities that we see nightly on our TV’s has become entertainment.” In all these video animations, Zhou does not take a position but rather chooses to let the viewer interpret each vignette in his or her own way.

The video work “Conspiracy” (2004) uses the interaction of two screens, and is made up of various materials including the human body, animation, multimedia images, and performance. “The visual disparity produced by the position, dislocation, and juxtaposition of the two screens create a kind of interesting phenomenon, one that might cause people to investigate the source of representation of the various events. This creates a discussion concerning the cause and effect, control, mutual destruction, and regeneration of the multiple relationships between everyday lives, texts, media, and world events. Additionally, the expression of the body language is not only a reflection of the ground's stimulation to the outside: the body itself is a source of imagination and energy, and an unrestrained vehicle.” -Zhou Xiaohu

Zhou Xiaohu has had a solo show of photography in Moscow in 2002, “China Now, a film festival at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2004), “Second Hand Reality, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2003), “A Strange Heaven- Contemporary Chinese Photography”, Rudolfinum Art Museum, Prague, Czech (2003), Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2002), “Express” Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art,Shanghai, China (2005), “Shanghai surprise”, Kulturreferentin der LHS Munchen, Germany (2005), “The Chinese” ,Wolfsburg Kunst museum ,Germany (2004), “Between past and Future”,International Center of Photography, New York (2004), 21st World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam Film Museum ,Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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Zhou Xiaohu