The Dust (2021)
Tianzhuo Chen (CN)

The Dust is a video installation that situates farming tools and ceremonial objects as the primary protagonists, while humans remain noticeably absent. The video takes on a Sisyphean quality — the tools and relics of worship symbolise the suffering through which humans make up for original sin. A performance without the presence of human figures therefore has no social order.  Romances, fights, and disasters never exist, and the only events that take place are those deriving from the original source of everything.

Chen reveals a world in disorder, objects and instruments linked together by the absurd logic of chaos and creation. It is this sense of absurdity, that can be understood as stemming from the separation of ritual and ceremony from the body, that Chen addresses with The Dust.

About the artist

Born in Beijing, Tianzhuo Chen currently lives and works in Berlin. As a young generation artist, Tianzhuo Chen skillfully works between the artistic disciplines of installation, performance, video, drawing on paper and photography. After graduating from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, he received his Master’s in Fine Arts degree from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. 

Many of his artworks require others’ participation or that of the audience to take the form of a “happening”, such as an underground party, staged performance, or more conceptually, a constructed ritual site, and ultimately transforming reality into fantasy. Within his artworks, Chen mixes his well versed knowledge of elements and symbols found in religion, subculture, popular culture and dance in order to juxtapose the atmosphere and cause the audience/participants to transcend both superficial states of body and spirit.

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