solo | Chen Shaoxiong: Prepared

Power Station of Art (PSA) will be presenting Chen Shaoxiong’s largest solo exhibition to date Chen Shaxiong: Prepared from June 11 to September 11, 2016. The exhibition covers the creative endeavour of the artist in the last three decades, especially focusing on major works in the last 15 years, with two new projects created in 2016. The body of works ranges from video, installation, photo-montage, painting to collective participation. The exhibition is curated by Hou Hanru.

Chen Shaoxiong grew up in southern China, where the informal urban spaces nurtured a sense of unconventional imagination and creative capacity in him. Early in the mid-1980s, he was involved with the underground and experimental art scene in Guangzhou. In the 1990s, he was a member of one of the most important artists group “Big Tail Elephants” in Guangzhou, Southern China, together with Lin Yilin, Liang Juhui and Xu Tan. Being at a “doubly marginalised” position, “Big Tail Elephants” often took collective action while preserving members’ individual uniqueness. The group intervened in informal urban spaces such as car parks, construction sites and offices, as well as the streets, with site-specific projects of performances and installations. Often conducted in a “guerrilla” style, their endeavours accumulated a series of milestone projects, which became vivid testimonies of the unprecedentedly rapid urbanisation and expansion in the Pearl River Delta region, inspiring and influencing the entire contemporary art ecology in southern China at the time.