Tianzhuo Chen currently lives and works in Beijing, China. After graduating from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. As a young generation artist, Tianzhuo Chen skillfully works between the artistic disciplines of installation, performance, video, drawing on paper and photography. Many of his artworks require others’ participation or that of the audience—so as to take the form of a “happening”—such as an underground party, staged performance, or more conceptually, a constructed ritual site, and ultimately transforming reality into fantasy. Within his artworks, Chen mixes his well versed knowledge of elements and symbols found in religion (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Shamanism), subculture (like cult cultures, drag and rave), popular culture (including cartoons, hip hop and electronic music) and dance (such as Japanese Butoh and Vogueing) in order to juxtapose the atmosphere and cause the audience/participants to transcend both superficial states of the body and spirit. Ultimately, arriving at what the artist himself has referred to as a “state of madness”.
His recent solo exhibitions include The Shepherd ( Kyoto Experiment, Kyoto); Trance (M Woods Museum, Beijing, 2019); GHOST (Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, 2017); Ishvara (Long March Space, Beijing, 2016); Tianzhuo Chen (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015). His selected group exhibitions include About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art (Wrightwood 659, Chicago, 2019); 6th Athens Biennale (Athens, 2018); Entropy (Faurschou Foundation Beijing, Beijing, 2018); Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (Cleveland, 2018); 1st Biennial of Contemporary Arts (Lisbon and Porto, 2017); The Exhibition of Annual of Contemporary Art of China 2016 (Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing, 2017), 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2016). His performance has been shown at The Broad Museum (Los Angeles, 2018); Barbican Centre (London, 2018); Wiener Festwochen (Vienna, 2017); Theater Der Welt (Hamburg, 2017); Tokyo Festival (Tokyo, 2017), among others.
As of September 2022
