Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen combines quotations from pop, folklore and commerce to create a global snapshot between kitsch and apocalypse. A live stream of consciousness in the rhythm of music.

With his premiere for steirischer herbst, Tianzhuo Chen stages a dark and, at the same time, upbeat pop opera in which instrumental live sounds mingle with pumping beats and where big-city fashion arrogance meets the camouflage jackets of Chinese farmers. The audience moves around an installation-style auditorium in which cultural codes and iconographic figures are dissected and meticulously reassembled by performers and musicians. The material for this hybrid, ecstatic ghoulishness comes from global club culture and corporate identities, from folklore and social media, and, not least, from discourses on “the Asian” and “the European” in which the East dreams up a West and vice versa.

Tianzhuo Chen is one of the most prominent exponents of a young generation of Chinese artists who celebrate with great self-confidence the extravagance and self-elected exoticisation of a commercialised Asian identity. For his objects, performances and video works he designs colourful grotesque imagery replete with references to Buddhism and LGBT symbolism, Butoh and drag, thus forging a direct link between the demise of outdated ideas on morality and traditional faith systems.

Konzept / Idee: Tianzhuo Chen
Konzept / Idee: Petra Pölzl
Dramaturgie: Petra Pölzl
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Beio
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: China Yu
Choreografie: Ylva Falk
Kostüme: asiandopeboys
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: artbox Graz
Musik: Dis Fig
Musik: Igor Dewe
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Le Brothers
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Le Ngoc Thanh
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Le Duc Hai
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: House of Drama
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Ylva Falk
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Igor Dewe
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Amélie Poulain
Produktion: Christina Helena Romirer

Mediathek