| Press release Zhenchen Liu |
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Soledad Senlle Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the Chinese artist Zhenchen Liu. A selection of Zhenchen Liu's videos and photographic work will be highlighted during this presentation. Liu divides his time between Paris and Shanghai. Whenever he goes back to Shanghai, he hardly recognizes his birthplace. In his work he brings out the alarming transformation of the Chinese metropolis, where every year almost one hundred thousand families are forced to move out of their homes. In a certain way, his films are documentaries about the frenetic way in which developers flatten and reconstruct whole neighbourhoods, leaving expropriated residents out on the street. He uses a personal poetics to accentuate the surrealism of the scale and speed of this metamorphosis, where the past is eradicated in favor of a modern but insane vision of the future. His camera glides with fluidity over ghostly panoramas of desolation, in which reality and fantasy intersect. The distance between the insinuated violence and the graceful style of his films gives Zhenchen Liu's work a remarkable tension.
In Soledad Senlle Gallery his newest video "The most powerful flowers in Art 2010" will be presented. With this work Zhenchen Liu criticizes the system of power of the contemporary art world. His video is inspired by the list of 100 most powerful people in the arts in 2010. In a kaleidoscopic video work, Liu shows the portraits of these 100 most powerful people as beautiful colorful flowers that bloom to then perish.
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