CM: And that sounds similar to Nabokov’s critique of the lazy reader — someone who wants to be spoon-fed instead of asking what the “author” is trying to do. What is your ideal “viewer” – how will she approach MadeIn’s production?
XZ: The ideal viewer never appears when you need them. So don’t worry about them.
CM: Are people sometimes too grown-up when they try to understand MadeIn’s production? Does it help to be child-like?
XZ: It doesn’t matter; there aren’t seamless eggs.
CM: Would you say that “Observation Misunderstanding” is one of the principle mediums with which MadeIn plays and experiments?
XZ: Maybe it could be described as the main content that was created since the establishment of the company.
CM: How would you describe the other or supporting content?
XZ: For example, “examining,” “looking for enemies,” and “recurrent dissatisfaction” are topics that are being created.
CM: Are some or all of these topics are particularly relevant to society in China now or are these topics “world” topics?
XZ: There aren’t differences; it just has to be important.
CM: Important – how?
XZ: As long as you think it is important, then it’s fine.
CM: Is your recent “Physique of Consciousness” project at the Bern Kunsthalle and at Long March Space in Beijing — which conflates sacred gestures from many religious practices — an example of how people’s “observation misunderstanding” operates? Or is it an example of how we are caught within media, that is, how life itself becomes an (endless) effect of media and mediation?
XZ: The main aspect of “Physique of Consciousness” is “combination.” Can such a way of composing avoid civilizational conflict? Or must civilizations be in conflict to have a sense of existence? Can it influence our bodies? (Looking at it now, there certainly is an influence). Is time another main element of this work as time for yoga is?
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CM: In your “Spread” series, the wave, for instance, is both an endless Hokusai tsunami and a Californian “Endless Summer” (3). But then it deconstructs itself, with references to Pop art and cheap artifice — the fake sun lit up like a Las Vegas motel-vacancy sign. In some sense, is MadeIn, as parodist, seeking to confront us with a comic reality in our own (comic) reality?
XZ: Well said, comic is also another parallel reality.
CM: Besides “Play,” MadeIn’s new work includes “Prey,” realistic paintings of poor homes (emphasized in the catalogue by being “displayed” in wealthy homes) and also “Action of Consciousness,” which involves items being thrown up into the air from a secretive booth. All of these works will be shown in the same exhibition. So what connects them?
XZ: Providing a relationship that changes the world. To become a beginning or an end again, to liberate those things called “artworks” from the contemporary art system (from consciousness).
CM: What does “consciousness” mean for MadeIn?
XZ: “To think” is “consciousness.”
CM: How do you feel that “Prey” develops the status value of art explored in your Beijing show last year, whereby value was ascribed to a photograph according to the value of its subject?
XZ: From a general point of view, this artwork is a “process of prey capturing.” At the same time, it is meant to satisfy people’s feelings for classicism, and people’s aesthetic need for “poverty.”
CM: Scale was an important aspect of work by “Xu Zhen.” What sort of role does it play for MadeIn?
XZ: Scale was generated by needs.
CM: To each according to his needs from each according to their ability?
XZ: Needs, supplies, creation, admission, all became today’s new art pattern — it isn’t simply an artwork (close to the concept of “multiple authorship”).
CM: Does or will MadeIn have an oeuvre or is it working hard to avoid one?
XZ: In a competitive mechanism, we use competition to compete.
CM: Compete against what? Many strong competitors use branding, their identifiable “style,” to promote themselves. But MadeIn eschews this – for MadeIn, everything is just, though not purely, media. It subverts this fundamental principle of the art (market) system.
XZ: We want to be the one who hangs the meat.
CM: Is MadeIn manufacturing a type of freedom?
XZ: There is no freedom.
CM: Doesn’t MadeIn enjoy types of freedoms, for instance to produce what it produces?
XZ: No.