Un-Interrupted Voice by Zhen Chen
Above photo I took in the Voorlinden Museum, but there are probably more alike installations by Zhen Chen like this one from Histoire Immigration:
Born in 1955 into a family of doctors, Chen Zhen went into exile in France in 1986. A true citizen of the world, he worked in New York as well as in Shanghai and Paris, his adopted city, before dying prematurely in 2000. In Paris, he “meets” other cultural contexts and confronts them. From then on, he continued to combine his own experiences in a work combining traditional and contemporary elements borrowed from Chinese and Western cultures. Strongly metaphorical, his work reflects “his vision of the world forged over almost thirty years by very nomadic personal experiences and extremely varied environments: ten years of cultural revolution, ten years of Chinese reform, ten years in the West” (Chen Zhen , Sonorous Silence, exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Oct. 1, 2003-Jan. 18, 2004, Paris). So many experiments which will lead him to question the notion of cultural identity and his own transcended identity.
Un-interrupted Voice, created in 1998, transforms chairs into drums. Through this metamorphosis of ordinary objects into a new type of musical instrument, the artist composes a hybrid work, made not of collages, but of a fusion of experiences and lifestyles.
For Chen Zhen, art has the same function as medicine, it is about “treating oneself by beating the drums…, massaging oneself, cleansing oneself, eliminating stress, and regaining psychological balance and emotional “. But, beyond its therapeutic dimension, Un-interrupted Voice finds its full meaning in its interaction with others, with the public invited to come and beat the heads of the drums. The piece expresses a desire for dialogue; it embodies and translates the meeting of musical, plastic, historical, political cultures…Work presented in the exhibition J’ai deux amours (November 16, 2011 – June 24, 2011)
Another one was on auction at Christie’s and fetched USD 50,400 in 2022.
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Chairs!
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