ART021 SHANGHAI CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR: Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai, China

The word “Xiang” also contains the meaning of “imagery” in an all-encompassing way, a clever wordplay by the artist to subtly combine his visual language with textual language. The word, along with its animal referent, is grand on a cosmic scale, while being optimistically childish and benignly rebellious at the same time. For the most part, these works are anti-secular, anti-intellectual, anti-system, and anti-solidification. The artist is also adept at merging traditional figurative painting and surrealistic techniques, integrating a series of seemingly realistic and familiar yet mysterious and unpredictable characters, elephants, and interstellar landscapes into a dreamlike, epic narrative. The houses, arcades, stairs, pipes, priests, psychic-like aliens, and dolls of man-beasts...Through fables and myth, the transient stream of consciousness is materialized into a lingering phantom, filling the holes and folds of the artist’s pictorial labyrinth.

This painting is a smaller version of Xu Bacheng's eponymous large-scale work The Elephant of Immortality. He often revisits older works to draw inspiration and enhance the significance of important motifs. The smaller works emphasize Xu's delicate pictorial arrangement that might be overlooked in larger works. 

In the work Give You a Promise, the artist incorporated the laws of energy conservation and entropy to create a POS machine running on a precise mechanism. With the support of two gear wheels on both ends, the revolving credit cards are transported all day long, passing through the card slot of the POS machine. Under the repeated and precise process of "swiping," energy is continuously generated. Excessive consumption in turn creates excessive data aggregation, but the machine itself is inevitably degradating as time goes on, therefore exposing its users to potential security risks like data leaking. This constant cycle continues as our desire, satisfaction, and sense of foreboding crisis are bound to coexist, forming a unique contemporary paradox. 

Xu Bacheng is a keen observer of life's various tricks played upon us. In this work, he collaborated with mechanical engineers to create a claw grabbing machine that periodically grabs the toy rabbit up and drops it down. The mechanical claw runs on a pre-determined algorithm that is embedded within the wooden structure.  

Xu Bacheng's interest in mechanical installation is persistent throughout the years. In this piece, the hand, which is composed of multiple smaller lego-textured components, has its thumb up by default. Once the electronic switch is turned on, the hand starts to rotate quickly, giving the viewer a thumbs-up while immediately followed by a thumbs-down. Playful yet psychologically disconcerting, the work embodies the artist's shrewd and mischievous character.