Chen Zhen

Purification Room . 2000

Chen exhibited his first installations in 1990, ten years before he died. In his work, Chen explored the dualities and contradictions of life as a means of creating harmony through difference. He used his personal experience of illness to reflect on the human condition, and viewed the natural materials that he used, such as water, earth and ash, as ‘images of the essence, of birth, of the source from which objects come, but also the place they return to after having circulated in society.’ In works such as Purification Room (2000/2012), ‘the natural materials are there to purify the objects after their use; for sublimating a latent spirit; and for provoking a new destiny at the fatal end of these objects.’
Hayward Gallery