Zhuo Qi

Born in 1985 in Fuxin, Liaoning, China. He lives and works between Paris and Limoges.

«I am not positive, I am not negative. I am poetive»
«I am a foreigner, I make strange objects in a foreign country. I try to understand and enter the society where I am. I carry my Chinese head, so there are always clashes between my own culture and Western culture (I live in these conditions)».

Starting from an attention to everyday objects and the urban environment, Zhuo Qi develops a prolific but coherent sculptural universe, whose spirit is distinctly parodic (imbalances, deformations, malfunctions, puns). The transformation he inflicts on objects constitutes the heart of his work: turning a stuffed animal inside out, soaking and petrifying soft objects in ceramic, molding and firing paper airplanes, and so on. Sensitive to details and shifts of all kinds (especially cultural ones), his work questions the relationship of bodies to objects, of objects to their staging, to their representations or to their possible activations.

During the last quarter of 2020, Zhuo Qi was invited to a residency by the Martell Foundation in Cognac. The foundation offered him the rare opportunity to have unlimited access to a glassblowing workshop; this is how he was able to develop his latest series of works Bubble-Game, mixing ancient Chinese sculptures and glassblowing techniques.
As an artist, Zhuo Qi's approach is based on the notion of culture shock. The meeting between Chinese and Western culture is a founding element of his work, both linguistically, historically, and in terms of the tradition and techniques of ceramics that he was taught at ENSA Limoges. Originally from the city of Fuxin in China, he regularly visits Jingdezhen, a city considered the world capital of porcelain. He finds part of his raw material in the mountains of waste generated by this industry, a material charged with history, which he restores, like an iconoclastic ceramicist, by intervening directly on the pieces of ceramic using various processes that may seem experimental but which prove to be perfectly mastered.
The result is a unique technique in which porcelain is both the material and the subject. Zhuo Qi uses this material in a radical and performative way, overturning the traditional forms of the ceramicist to create surprising sculptures that completely break with the usual use of objects.
It is no longer the ceramic that the artist mistreats but excellent reproductions of ancient Chinese sculptures that he has previously and meticulously collected during his travels in China.
Often deteriorated by time, these sculptures are broken, fractured with missing limbs. Zhuo Qi has made it his mission to bring them back to life, to restore them in his own way: he will use blown glass to fill the void, the missing part, so that the pre-existing work of art becomes another work, a new life cycle is created, recalling the Buddhist cycles of reincarnation. The alchemy that takes place between the form of the original, sometimes thousand-year-old stone sculpture and the contemporary and delicate appearance of the colored glass that supports it leads us to the strange, the incongruous, notions dear to the artist for whom humor and transgression are natural forms of communication. The viewer is struck by the paradox that surrounds each work in the series; the aesthetics and power of these thousand-year-old Buddha sculptures are combined with those of these fragile and colorful glass cushions: all of this is strangely beautiful...