Zheng Guogu: Brain Nerves, The World is Getting Compressed, Dialogue with Infinite Dimensions 

With the infinite number of stars, the universe itself can be seen as a whole world with infinite dimensions. As you lock your soul in this infinite-dimensional world, it would become one dimension again when zoomed out to a microscopic point.

If a life went from one dimension to infinite dimensions, it could be a life that exists everywhere. It’s omnipresent. It simply returns to one dimension when it reaches infinite dimensions.

                                                      – Zheng Guogu

An Alternative Portrait

The Brain Nerves series is based on the understanding coming from Zheng Guogu’s long-term observation of the fundamental influences on activities of the human consciousness. The artist sees the consciousness’ formless activities as one genre of energy, and represents the photic qualities of movements of energy using images in order to transform them into paintings directly perceptible to a viewer.

The U-shapes correspond to a person’s neural circuitries as well as the various forms of changing energies surrounding their neural circuitries. U-shapes also reveal the relationship between three different functions of the brain: left, right and cerebellum; reason, emotion and memory. The colors of U-shapes also reflect the intensities of the energy of the subjects’ consciousness, while all the different forms of connections generated between the left and right parts of the ‘U’ reflect different states of the energy of consciousness. From here, we can trace the various appearances of consciousness energy in history and the natural laws of the progress of human civilizations.

The painting invites us to perceive an alternative spiritual portrait emerging from the moment, when the drawing of the neural circuitries overlaps a daily scenario related to a personage.

The World is Getting Compressed

The Universe is Expanding, The World is Getting Compressed No.2 (2007-2021) is transformed from Zheng Guogu’s previous painting entitled Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain No.129. In the painting series Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain started in 2005, Zheng Guogu uses fabrics of various colors and textures (most of which come from the interior design and renovation industry familiar to him) as canvases, and the texts in the paintings are sourced from the 1990s Hong Kong youth popular culture magazine YES. These texts are about idols, private life of celebrities, popular music, fashion, shopping, relationships and horoscopes, which belong to a genre of mantras preaching consumerist culture to young people. Zheng Guogu extracted the words and fonts from the magazines and then rearranged and colored them. After the computers have filled the texts with colors, the media information has gone through a painterly transformation.

If the Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain series is more about dealing with “constant views”—the exchange between the density of symbols and information and daily information consumption—then, in The Universe is Expanding, and The World is Getting Compressed, the materiality of the painting has been hugely transformed by using text and re-polishing the medium over and over again. It allows us to observe the state of motion of the human body and perceive its relationship with that of the universe.
Every individual embodies a universe corresponding to the external universe—the microscopic universe within the human body corresponds to the macroscopic universe. The human body is also in such a constant yet holistic state of motion—we are both processing and responding to the world around us, hence renewing our relationship with it. Should we measure it with the above-mentioned state of motion within our body, we may obtain a more holistic view of the universe—we may have a clearer sense of contemporaneity and break free from any false reflections.

Booth: Booth K12, Hall 2.1

Private View (by invitation only)
Tuesday, September 21, 2021, 11am to 8pm
Wednesday, September 22, 2021, 11am to 8pm
Thursday, September 22, 2021, 11am to 7pm

Vernissage (by invitation only)
Thursday, September 23, 2021, 2pm to 7pm

Public Days
Friday, September 24 – Sunday, September 26, 2021, 11am to 7pm
Venue: Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland 

“Zheng Guogu”, exhibition views at Art Basel | Basel 2021, Basel, 2021.
Courtesy of the Artist and Vitamin Creative Space. © Vitamin, 2021.
All works of art by Zheng Guogu ©the Artist, 2021.