«Cola Projet» – HE Xiangyu – 17 fév. au 09 avril 2011

Born in 1986 in Kuandian, China
Living in Beijing, China and Berlin, Germany.
He Xiangyu is based in Berlin and Beijing. In 2008 he graduated from Oil Painting Department at Shenyang Normal University. He Xiangyu is part of a generation of Chinese artists who grew up during a period of rapid urbanisation he has said that “I’m seeking to adjust and guide people’s perception through the material changes within the object”, using a range of media to reflect on philosophical ideas such as the increasing materialism and obsolescence of our society as well as the effects of the institutionalisation and commercialisation of contemporary art. His famous Coca-Cola Project deals with the inextricable relationship between living and consuming, with culture and waste, but also with notions of art production and consumption.  Effectively re-making an industrial product by adopting different, and much slower industrial means, Coca-Cola Project reconfigures a key product of Western capitalism and also its accelerated notion of time.

In his career to date he has produced several long-term projects besides Lemon Project (2016-), including Coca-Cola Project (2009-2012), which involved boiling down 127 tons of liquid to create a solid mass that spoke to ideas of consumption and material transformation. Often his projects involve large teams, not only from his studio but in the case of Tank Project (2011-2013), a factory of female Chinese needle-workers who sewed a full size tank using premium leather. These artworks or “projects” constantly break through and integrate conventional boundaries among different media, such as movie-making : after Evidence (2016), his new film Sylvain (2017-19) presents an alternative and metaphorical discourse about power and control as well as self-identification.

Albeit young, he is already a confirmed Chinese contemporary artist who acquired a worldwide reknown, consecrated in 2019 by his participation to the 58^th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale, as well as an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.