LONDON.- Influenced by fashion design, publishing, and scenography, Bruno Zhu’s object-led installations explore notions of agency, authorship, consumption, and power. License to Live marks Zhu’s first institutional UK solo exhibition which centres a written licence agreement as his response to the invitation to develop a new commission.
Authored by Zhu, the agreement details a step-by-step guide to exhibition design that traverses colour, display, ornamentation, and orientation. Specific tones of red, green, yellow, blue, and purple have been selected by Zhu based on their histories of toxic production and relationship to applied arts. When painted across walls and doors, they create a colour code that draws attention to surface as site. Cabinets with openings shaped like playing card symbols – motifs that recur across Zhu’s practice – point to the abstraction of histories of violence, and the colonial inheritances of display commonly found across museums and historic homes. The agreement’s instruction to tie bows around objects, brings formal devices of desire and consumerism into contact with sites of artistic production. A reorientation of 19th century design – parquet flooring, damask style wallpaper, and ornate mouldings turned on their side – traces the reproducibility of historical styles for a mass market.
At Chisenhale Gallery, Zhu’s protocols of display are applied across four interconnected rooms; a preliminary staging absent of any objects. As the agreement is entered into by subsequent institutions or individuals, artworks will be selected by Zhu and future commissioners, and introduced into a restaging of the design.
License to Live explores the visual codes and abstractions embedded across public and private spaces, while raising questions related to artistic labour, ownership, and control within cultural production. Underpinning Zhu’s motivation to create a licence agreement are questions of newness within artistic practice. License to Live can be repurposed or recontextualized to produce newness indefinitely.
Following License to Live at Chisenhale Gallery, the commission will be licensed by CAM-Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon, where it will be reactivated with a selection of works from its collection of modern and contemporary art.
Bruno Zhu lives and works between Portugal and The Netherlands. Selected exhibitions include: Everybody is Crazy, What Pipeline, Detroit (2023); O Quilombismo, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2023); Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2023); I am not afraid, Cordova, Barcelona (2022); Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); Domestic Drama, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Graz (2021); and Shhhhhhh, UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund), Oslo (2020). He is a member of A Maior, a curatorial program set in a home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.
