Artist
Zheng Guogu
郑国谷
Date of birth
1970
Place Of birth
Yangjiang, Guangdong, China
Biography
Born in 1970 in the Pearl River Delta town of Yangjiang, in Guangdong, Zheng Guogu moves between calligraphy, painting, sculpture, performance, photography, video, and installation. He studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1992, and then returned to Yangjiang, where he co-founded an artists’ collective, the Yangjiang Group, in 2002. His work is inspired by daily experience, mass media, and local culture, intentionally – and often provocatively – blurring the boundaries between art and life. It is also inflected by his deep knowledge of traditional Chinese art, and Buddhist and Daoist philosophy. An ongoing project involves the transformation of 40,000 square metres of land on the outskirts of Yangjiang, which he has developed as a kind of post-modern literati garden, habitat and exhibition space: Zheng designed and built radically innovative structures and adapted existing buildings, a project which involved him in lengthy negotiations with farmers and local government authorities. His independent work, and his work with the Yangjiang Group, has been exhibited widely within China and internationally, including in Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2017. Zheng Guogu lives and works in Yangjiang.

Works by this artist