Zhuo Qi

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

"I'm not positive, I'm not negative, I'm poetic".
"I'm a foreigner, I make strange objects in a foreign country. I'm trying to understand and enter the society I'm in. I wear my Chinese head, so there are always clashes between my own culture and Western culture (I live in these conditions)."

Starting with a focus on everyday objects and the urban environment, Zhuo Qi develops a profuse yet coherent sculptural universe, whose spirit is distinctly parodic (imbalances, deformations, malfunctions, puns). At the heart of his work is the transformation of objects: turning a stuffed animal inside out, soaking and petrifying soft objects in ceramic, molding and firing paper airplanes... Sensitive to details and shifts of all kinds (particularly cultural), his work questions the relationship between bodies and objects, and between objects and their staging, representation or possible activation.

During the last quarter of 2020, Zhuo Qi was invited to take up a residency at the Martell Foundation in Cognac. The foundation offered him the rare opportunity to have unlimited access to a glassblower's studio; this is how he was able to develop his latest series of Bubble-Game works blending Chinese antique sculptures and the glassblowing technique.
As an artist, Zhuo Qi's approach is based on the notion of culture shock. The encounter between Chinese and Western culture is a founding element of his work, both in terms of language and history, as well as the tradition and techniques of ceramics taught at ENSA Limoges. Originally from the Chinese city of Fuxin, he regularly travels to Jingdezhen, considered the porcelain capital of the world. In the mountains of waste generated by this industry, he finds part of his raw material, a material steeped in history, a history that he takes it upon himself to restore, like an iconoclastic ceramist, by intervening directly on the pieces of ceramic using various processes that might seem experimental, but which turn out to be perfectly mastered.
The result is a technique all his own, in which porcelain is both material and subject. Zhuo Qi uses this material in a radical and performative way, overturning the traditional forms of the ceramist to create surprising sculptures that break completely with the usual use of objects.
It's no longer ceramics that the artist is abusing, but excellent reproductions of ancient Chinese sculptures that he has meticulously collected during his travels in China.
Often deteriorated by time, these sculptures are broken, fractured and missing limbs. Zhuo Qi has set out 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 cycle of life is created reminiscent of Buddhist cycles of reincarnation. The alchemy that takes place between the shape of the original stone sculpture, sometimes thousands of years old, and the contemporary, delicate aspect of the colored glass that supports it, leads us towards the strange, the incongruous, notions dear to the artist for whom humor and transgression are natural forms of communication. The viewer is gripped by the paradox that surrounds each work in the series; the aesthetics and power of these millennia-old Buddha sculptures are matched by that of these fragile, colorful glass cushions: all strangely beautiful...