Hu Zi is participating "Fantasy Creator" at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai. The exhibition attempts to use matrix as the conceptual model to engage the public discourse of contemporary visual culture. In her long-term practice of making portraits, Hu Zi collates individual experiences for the construction of a self-image by fabricating the very unique touch of body boundaries. The selected works for the exhibition originate in the artist’s findings during her travel across Italy last year, speaking to certain historical narratives while conjuring up some characters from the text.
Selected works at "Fantasy Creator"
胡子，《摔跤者》，2016年，纸上水粉，61 × 45.3厘米 | Hu Zi, Wrestler, 2016, gouache on paper, 61 × 45.3 cm
胡子，《蓝色的莫扎特》，2017年，纸上水粉，63 × 54.5厘米 | Hu Zi, Blue Mozart, 2017, gouache on paper, 63 × 54.5 cm
胡子，《让·米切尔·巴斯奎特》，2017年，纸上水粉，73 × 54厘米 | Hu Zi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2017, gouache on paper, 73 × 54 cm
Last July, I had already left Florence after making my way through the rich array of sculptures and frescoes there and drove northward from Milan. From the car window, the black mountains seemed to gather even more densely together, and the deep blue cliffs were almost perfectly vertical, reaching out sharply and infinitely to the sky. I arrived in Trento and parked my car in front of one of its numerous palaces, and as I pushed open the arched door, I met head-on a golden fresco on the domed ceiling showing several naked cupids playing various musical instruments in a deep-yellow glow. I then went to the basement where the figure of a burly "wrestler" was portrayed on a large pink-colored pitched roof. Davide handed me a book with an entry saying that in the autumn of 1771 then 15-year-old Mozart held a concert in this palace built in the 16th century during the Renaissance period. The next evening, I told Davide at the railway station, "I've decided that I'll paint Mozart." On the train back to Milan, I proceeded reading the book Jean-Michel Basquiat.
- Hu Zi
