HOW Art Museum | Wenzhou is pleased to present Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu’s solo exhibition “Misinterpret” on September 14th, 2016. This exhibition presents near 30 pieces of representative art works from Zhou Xiaohu since 2012 and focuses on four research directions of Zhou’s recent exploration such as “The history of misinterpret”, “Marionette video”, “To view objects in terms of objects” and “The study of subjectivity”.

Misinterpret, as the tittle of this exhibition, originates from the artist’s important creation series “The history of misinterpret”. Zhou uses the famous art works or art events in the history as base maps and misinterprets the past historical experience into current interpretation of recreation in a relaxed absurd artistic language.

Human-sized marionettes are made through collaborating with Puppet Theatre of Tai Shun, Zhe Jiang. The marionette show, named ‘Happy Wandering’, is performed and filmed in several sites including a filming location of Tai Shun, a hydropower plant, a bauxite mine, and a commercial district in Shanghai. The videos of the show are played through a dual-channel projector in the exhibition hall. The quadriphonic sound of the video could be heard all over the hall. The dual-channel video of ‘Happy Wandering’ blurs the boundary between reality and myth. It draws mysterious performance element from traditional puppet opera into filming contemporary daily landscapes. Ten separate sessions are filmed. In the post editing process, vernacular edition of ‘Zhuangzi’ is read out as asides of the performance.

For the series of “To view objects in terms of objects”, there are several sets of installations, such as bird-and-flower set, tool sets and others. Strong spotlights light up these installations, leaving their shadow behind. Each shadow of the installation looks like a piece of Chinese calligraphy. Clearly, words and phrases like “Extreme Surprise”, “Breeze While Shaking”, “You Are Just A Piece of Meat”, and so forth have in and of themselves a strong perceptual character, to the point of encompassing his forms of writing and also hinting at a certain corporeality—instead of a stereotypical mechanical product.

“The study of subjectivity” consists of “Scatter Perspective” and “Emotional pixel”. Zhou Xiaohu sets out to integrate these traditional ‘scattered point’ perspectives within his designs for Chimera, using montage to emphasise its multi-spatial representation, by cutting and remaking classical paintings as ‘readymades’. A new series of graphic works has also been based on this. The artist photographed the brush strokes of classic Expressionism and Pop paintings in art galleries. These brush strokes illustrate emotional status of painters, and also reflect instantaneous interactions between painters’ bodies and canvas. The artist then converts the photos into mosaic images using the filter technology in Photoshop Software. The digital mosaic images magnify the brush strokes, through which we could imagine affective dispositions of painters when they painted.

About the exhibition

Dates: Sep 14, 2016 - Nov 20, 2016

Venue: HOW Art Museum

Courtesy of the artist and HOW Art Museum.