Ten Thousand Customers 4
Zheng Guogu
郑国谷
Production date
1997-2014
Object Detail
Media
photograph
Measurements
59 x 87 cm
Notes
Zheng Guogu is critical of the economy of the artworld in which he participates. As part of a generation of Chinese artists who have been affected by the explosion of global market forces, he questions the significance of calligraphy, painting, performance and architecture for contemporary society, and challenges their commodification. Early experiments took the form of photographs made with the cheapest possible camera technology. Ten Thousand Customers 1, 2, 3 and 4 (1997–2014) were originally made as a provocation to the overheated art market: would ten thousand buyers appear and collect the entire series? Each single work is made up of one hundred thumbnail-sized photographs of various commodities, including cars and motorcycles, cut up and re-assembled, a comment on the flood of cheap consumer goods flowing from the Pearl River Delta factory towns into the global marketplace. Later works continued his investigation of the sign systems of global capital, ranging from installations of rusted Coca-Cola cans to the carving of slogans and Chinese characters in marble, juxtaposing advertising signs and brand names with Buddhist mantras: this jumble of texts and images reveals the contemporary world as not so much a Tower of Babel as a Tower of Babble, a never-ending, overwhelming bombardment of signs, codes and texts.
Accession number
2014.153