My “ZOON: Beijing – Bio” series is a personal record of my experience. The yearlong painting project tracks my impressions as an outsider relocated to Beijing.
My “ZOON: Beijing – Bio” series is a personal record of my experience. The yearlong painting project tracks my impressions as an outsider relocated to Beijing.
Beijing, as a city undergoing great change, supplies me with ample inspiration and motivation to continue and to improve the ZOON series (first started in 1996 when I was a resident artist at Ludwig Museum, Germany). One year ago, as a new comer in Beijing, resuming the ZOON series felt like the best means of greeting and introducing myself to Beijing.
“ZOON: Beijing – Bio” is a made up term, that loosely refers to a new species of living creatures co-existing within the same space, giving birth to strange and unique off-spring. In other words, for me, today’s Beijing is a place where the macro and the monumental are no longer the opposite of the micro and the miniscule, nor is the inferior meant to be any different from the superior. We are all thrown together in Beijing, under one roof, without discrimination or rejection of any one group by another.Living in Beijing, I am constantly aware of the city’s unique characteristics: I find Beijing comparable to a huge and limitless magnetic field, punctured now and then by moments of human destruction disturbance and crisis. Beijing day or night retains a subtle element of turmoil, anxiety, and passive aggression. All of us resident in Beijing, local or expatriate, early arrival or latecomer, are joined together by this feeling of perpetual motion and swirling non-stop activity. And this constant intermingling of new comers and local residents can only serve to increase the tension and rhythm of the city. “ZOON: Beijing Bio” is no more than one man’s attempt to observe and to grapple with this incessant whir of urban energy and activity that is unique to Beijing.
