Bodhisattva

"Zhong Biao has captured the pulse of China's social reforms through the visual symbols Chinese people are familiar with. He takes all the visual experienes of an era as the image sources for his works, including sculpture and china representing China's past glories, the labor models in the Cultural Revolution, and such symbols of modern life as McDonalds and Boeing aircrafts. What attracts artists is the different meanings of these images, because in the language of ordinary Chinese people, what used to be synonymous of the once corrupted capitalist society of colonization is now the symbol of modernity. With the developlment of movie, TV, printing and digital technology, modern people have successfully undergone an acceptance style transition from one of letters to one of images. With such a new style, images from different times are frequently taken out of their original context and used repeatedly. And in this process they are continuously endowed with new cultural meanings. Zhong Biao's work is like what Michael Foucault described as 'knowledge archeology.' In 'visual archeology' similar to 'knowledge archeology', he cuts a section from the visual symbols people are familiar with, then takes out those fragmented symbols from the cultural deposits of different times, and last arranges and combines them in a unique way. What he wants to present is not the symbols themselves, but the track of changes in the meanings of the images by setting up specific scenes. Instead of juxtaposing concepts, he expresses himself through paradoxical scenes" (Pi Li in Zhong Biao: Works 1994-2006, Tokyo 2006, unpaged).