PRESS KIT ZHUO QI Y’a des jours comme ça
Exhibition from January 26 to 23 February 2019 Opening Saturday 26 January from 3 pm to 8 pm
17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 www.fillesducalvaire.com [email protected]
Press request : [email protected] ZHUO QI Y’a des jours comme ça Exhibition from January 26 to 23 February 2019 Opening Saturday 26 January from 3 pm to 8 pm
The galerie Les Filles du Calvaire has the pleasure of presenting “ Y’a des jours comme ça ”, Zhuo Qi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Between tradition and humour, the artist suggests we rethink the secular art of ceramic.
Zhuo Qi is from China (Fuxin), and often goes to Jingdezhen, a city that has produced pottery for over 1,700 years, an industry that also generates mountains of waste from which he often draws his raw materials. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans and the Haute École Méditation, 2018 Porcelain, sandstone. d’Art et de Design in Geneva, he deepened his studies into ceramics at the In collaboration with Georges Sybesma as part of the residency La Borne. École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Limoges and carried out experiments in porcelain factory kilns.
Zhuo Qi stokes his œuvre with the linguistic and semantic misunderstandings he witnesses, and of which he is sometimes the victim, a state of tension between Chinese and Western culture: “I have no other choice than to work with these very common misunderstandings. They are an opportunity to extend language, to play with meanings and signs. I invent nothing, I transform and grasp for myself only what is already existing in the collective imagination.” The relationship with language and non-meaning are thus the constitutive elements of Zhuo Qi’s approach. The artist navigates from one language to another, gives form to misunderstandings.
He combines Chinese and French expertise to develop his own specific technique: a radical and performative use of porcelain. It is both the material and the subject. He transforms and manhandles the ceramist’s traditional forms to produce disconcerting sculptures, radically at odds with the usual function of the objects that he manufactures, collects or restores. The artist’s iconoclastic spirit makes fun of “delicate porcelain” by incorporating it in improbable objects (teddy bears, bricks, etc.).
With the J’ai allumé un vase group, he attacks it with fire crackers, mixing two emblematic practices of Chinese culture: the traditional technique of ceramics and the popular use of fire crackers celebrating the Chinese calendar.
17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected] The china chairs imitating bamboo presented at the gallery illustrate this principle of diversion. The artist’s departure point was the popular bamboo chair from the Jingdezhen region. He plays with the robustness of the original material of “worn out” chairs which collapse under their own weight during the firing, transform into an “idea of the chair” and no longer represent anything other than the bamboo material and its universal place in Chinese culture: tree, construction material, food source, writing medium and tool, motif of traditional painting…
In 2018, during an arts residency at the Contemporary Ceramics Centre of La Borne, Zhuo Qi focused on the vase, an object par excellence of the potter’s craft. Produced in collaboration with the ceramist craftsman Georges Sybesma, Zhuo Qi took a lived experience as a starting point: a vase can “survive” falling down when it contains flowers. He then proposed a series of tipped- over and distorted vases, from which spring forth against earth (and always in ceramic) flowers, branches, stalks and petals. Here again, the artist emptied the conventional bouquet of flowers standing on a table of meaning, thereby turning the art of living upside down.
Dance of chairs, 2018 In Zhuo Qi we should see the posture of an iconoclastic artist of languages Porcelain (50 x 53 x 40 cm) Courtesy Galerie Les filles and symbols who nourishes his work with several artistic legacies. Y’a des du calvaire. jours comme ça confronts us with the vision of imperfect ceramics, the image of a contemporary “bungle” fully taken on board.
Je suis fatigué, 2012 Sandstone (15,5 x 16 x 13cm) Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire.
17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected] ZHUO QI Born in 1985 in Fuxin (Chine) Lives and works in Paris (France)
Having worked in France since 2008, Zhuo Qi fuels his artistic practice with the daily experience of the semantic and linguistic miracles generated by cultural gap and its long history of misunderstandings. Through humor and ceramics, he confronts traditions and know- how. In his work, porcelain is both the medium and the object of an experimental “cuisine” characterized by the creation of objects involving foreign bodies immerged in incongruous, enigmatic, sometimes hostile, but always amusing environments.
RECENT SOLO SHOWS (selection)
2019 Y’a des jours comme ça, Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris 2018 Méditation, Centre céramique contemporaine, La Borne, France Best (iaire), galerie Porte Avion, Marseille, France 2017 I BURNED ANGELS, Edmond Gallery, Berlin Métamorphose de l’ordinaire, Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris, France Matière Première, Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris, France La comédie du langage, galerie hôtel de ville Chinon, Chinon, France Les archives du feu, HEAD Geneva, Switzerland 2016 Firecrackers allow the neighbours to live in peace and harmony, Untilthen Gallery, Paris Détournements et distorsions, 6 Mandel, Paris, France Matieres grises et noirs desseins, Porte avion Gallery, Marseille, France Salon de Montrouge 16, Montrouge, France Contemporary Ceramics, Art Beijing, Beijing, Chine Confronting Anitya in Gasometer, Liechtenstein and KunstPalais Liechtenstein WANT TO COME OVER, Montparnasse, Paris, France KAO EXPORT LTD, the National Museum Adrien Dubouché, Limoges, France Choséité, Épisodique Gallery, Paris, France 2015 Working in progress, OÙ Gallery, Marseille Private Choice15, FIAC, Paris, France Confronting Anitya, Musée de Salagon, Mane, France Remarquer la porcelaine, Wroclaw, Poland 2015 Fragile, Chenaux Gallery, Paris, France
17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected] IMAGES AVAILABLE FOR PRESS
Dance of chairs, 2018 Méditation, 2018 Porcelain (50 x 53 x 40 cm) Porcelain, sandstone. Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire In collaboration with Georges Sybesma as part of the residency La Borne. Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire
Méditation, 2018 Porcelain, sandstone. In collaboration with Georges Sybesma as part of the residency La Borne.
Je suis fatigué, 2012 Porcelain (14,5 x 14 x 19,5 cm) Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire
J’ai allumé un vase, 2015 Je suis fatigué, 2012 Video (1’7’’) Sandstone (15,5 x 16 x 13cm) Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire Press request : [email protected] 17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected]