ARTIST:
Zheng Guogu
In Year Two Thousand, Another Two Thousand Years To Rust Zheng uses iron for its connotations as primitive, industrial, and militaristic material, as well as for it’s sheer weight, to cast a variety of liquor bottles. Zheng’s sculpture makes reference to China’s fast expanding economy in relation to its millennia-old history, humorously posing the transient icons of commodity culture and frivolous indulgence as indestructible anti-ergonomic ballasts. In theory, each of Zheng’s bottles should take 2000 years to fully disintegrate, allegorically reversing the calendar of Western civilisation and restoring a balance of nature.
Zheng Guogu’s sculptural work often combines enduring and imperious materials with unorthodox and fragile substances, the physicality of his forms operating as both tactile and symbolic matter. In Waterfall, melted wax pours over a metal ballast, literally freezing poetry in motion, embedding calligraphy scripts in the pristine fountain. Suggestive of a mountainous landscape, Waterfall is both illusory and monumental, creating an image of cyclical purity, a suspended and harmonious tension between permanence and temporality; its ethereal whiteness in Chinese culture signifies grief and mourning.
