"I invent nothing, I transform and grasp for myself only what is already existing in the collective imagination.”
The galerie Les Filles du Calvaire has the pleasure of presenting “ Y’a des jours comme ça ”, Zhuo Qi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Between tradition and humour, the artist suggests we rethink the secular art of ceramic.
Zhuo Qi est originaire de Chine (Fuxin), et se rend Zhuo Qi is from China (Fuxin), and often goes to Jingdezhen, a city that has produced pottery for over 1,700 years, an industry that also generates mountains of waste from which he often draws his raw materials. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans and the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, he deepened his studies into ceramics at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Limoges and carried out experiments in porcelain factory kilns. Zhuo Qi stokes his oeuvre with the linguistic and semantic misunderstandings he witnesses, and of which he is sometimes the victim, a state of tension between Chinese and Western culture: “I have no other choice than to work with these very common misunderstandings. They are an opportunity to extend language, to play with meanings and signs. I invent nothing, I transform and grasp for myself only what is already existing in the collective imagination.” The relationship with language and non-meaning are thus the constitutive elements of Zhuo Qi’s approach. The artist navigates from one language to another, gives form to misunderstandings.