MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present artist Feng Zhixuan’s solo exhibition “The One” on March 4, 2023, featuring three groups of exclusively created sculptures. Unlike sculptors who have dedicated their work to celebrating the achievements of humankind, Feng’s practice accomplishes a deconstructive tribute to human activity.

Feng’s trajectory starts in Wenzhou, expands to the Amazon jungle of South America after living in London and Beijing, and lingers in Shanghai as the pandemic rages. Constituting the artist’s hybrid subjectivity, this global movement has become his powerful deconstructive tool to confirm the polyphony of Chinese contemporary art as well as the narrative of Chinese civilization.

The nomadic rather than sedentary way of working and living urges Feng to form mutual understanding and interact with the unfamiliar reality of his environment. He refuses to offer a universal art view or commodity that is equally valid in any time and place within the art context; instead, his sculptures are an absolute commitment to the geological ecosystem, politics, society, and ethics of the present, an unduplicated empirical experience. In this sense, sculpture is seen by Feng as a by-product of his engagement with the field, the process of reflection and practice, thus enabling the artist to choose the site of practice within the site of experience.

Being on site in the post-epidemic era, in this solo exhibition, the artist extracts three experiences of human activity that involve confrontation with nature: whaling, water management, and global trade, which emerge repeatedly upon the end of tribal civilization. Human beings tend to establish genealogies, histories and legacies for the causes and lives to which they are committed. The narrative of their confrontation with the nature are continually mythologized as a collective expedition, followed by new expeditions after weakening, over and over again. Feng attempts to portray the contingency of these experiences, as well as certain momentary facts constructed based on power, thereby rendering a monument that does not exist for the sake of commemoration.