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Description

Text: Dr. Sophia Kidd

The artist has chosen examples of sculptures previously exhibited in his private museum, the Zhu Cheng Chengdu Private Stone Carving Museum, and placed them in this exhibition along with a series of hand-drawn portraits also on exhibition in his private museum. During China’s Cultural Revolution, there was an impulse to overturn nostalgic devotion to China’s past, to move forward into the future. 

Coupled with theft, this drive for progress saw many ancient images of the Three Religions (Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism) beheaded or otherwise mutilated. Here the artist exhibits these mutilated ancient stone torsos and heads along with the hand-drawn recreations of the heads. Zhu Cheng’s portraits are rendered much as the portraits of the Ba and Shu forebears are in another of his works on exhibition in Geographies of Feeling—in a xieyi 写意 manner of abstraction. This manner of abstraction serves to retrieve what cannot be seen today, to highlight what has been erased from cultural memory.

Text: Zhu Cheng

“From the 1980s to the present, decades of energy and effort have been spent to complete the Zhu Cheng Chengdu Private Stone Carving Museum collection project. Thousands of pieces of stone carvings from the Han Dynasty to the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing Dynasties, over two thousand years of portraits have been assembled.

The museum takes as its theme the totemic architecture of stone carvings, and the architecture of classical Chinese images. Ancient people used architecture as a shelter for the body and as a scene for the spirit, enshrining the body and spirit in the form of totem plates in underground catacombs and buildings.

They serve as records of architectural forms from different historical periods: of houses, buildings, platforms, pavilions, palaces, temples, chambers, offices, places, cities, and halls. At the same time, they inscribe the evolution of totemic architecture: from the figurative house to the conceptual city, and from the earthly architecture to the heavenly sanctuary. We discover a vivid history of ancient underground society with its urban culture, along with the countryside, architecture, religion, art, and folklore. “

-Excerpt from Life • Fate • Destiny

The past, present and future of the countryside + city + architecture