Chen Zhen, Drawing for Jardin Lavoir, 2000,
Drawing for Jardin Lavoir, 2000, ink painting and collage on paper, 100 x 70 cm.
Chen Zhen (1955-2000) is a major contemporary artist of the late 20th century.nd century. He was mainly active in China and France. A painter at the beginning, he became known for his installations that earned him international fame. At the end of the 1990s, he designed a vast project, the Jardin Lavoir, to which the work acquired by the Cernuschi Museum is linked. In this graphic creation, dated 2000, ink painting and collage are combined on the same support which presents in its center the skeleton of a rib cage surrounded by fragments of photographs printed in black and white and inscriptions in French, English and Chinese.
The main theme of this work is a reflection on bathing and more generally on the body. The photocopies of photographs represent bathing scenes that refer to various cultural environments (hot springs in Japan, hammam in Turkey) and to a traditional context of understanding body care. Some of the handwritten notes clarify the artist's thoughts, which evoke these traditional practices, in their sacred (baptism, purification rites) or profane (massage, body care) dimensions, the synthesis of which could be the concept of a pagan cathedral whose vaults refer to the hammam, but also to the architecture of the Albigensian Mills where the work was first created. Thus, the intelligence of traditional worlds that produce architectural structures dedicated to bathing or develop corners of nature that lend themselves to it, is opposed to the current world where "the inability to create an environment for bathing is becoming a major problem", as the artist notes.
Chen Zhen's questioning naturally embraces therapeutic issues, referring to the inside of the body, as signified by the structure of the rib cage and the inscription evoking "the system of pipes for washing the inside of the body". A network of lines connecting the spinal column to the different photographs and annotations could represent this internal irrigation system. The whole is part of the well-known axes of reflection of the artist who at this time of his life studied Chinese medicine and often refers to Taoist images that describe the body and its internal organs as a kind of interior landscape (neijing tu).
The work is therefore representative of Chen Zhen's modes of expression and his favourite themes. But if it lends itself to an independent reading, it must also be considered in the context of the original creation of the Jardin Lavoir installation in 2000 at the departmental centre for contemporary art in Albi, installed in the old Albi mills. The Albi Mills are a historic monument overlooking the Tarn. The sound and visible presence of water outside and inside the building directly inspired Chen Zhen, who installed a set of eleven wash-house beds filled with objects grouped according to the themes of daily life (books, kitchen utensils, computer equipment, etc.). In another version of the project, which was not realised, eleven basins in the shapes of the eleven organs took the place of the beds, more directly evoking the internal vision of the body suggested by Chen Zhen's painting. This "purification garden" is parallel and complementary to the "Zen Garden", another major project by the artist dating from the same extremely creative period, which preceded the artist's death in 2000. The work fits particularly well into the contemporary collections of the Cernuschi Museum, dedicated as much to Asian artists active in France as to the practice of ink in its diversity.