Zheng Guogu

The Aesthetic Resonance of Chakra No. 1, 2014

The probing of the boundaries between art and the everyday, between elitist art appreciation and (mass) consumption, are important themes in the artwork of Zheng Guogu, who experiments with various different media and art techniques, such as calligraphy, architecture, performance and photography. In the painting that has been acquired for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection – The Aesthetic Resonance of Chakra No. 1 – we see Zheng once again taking an interest in the adaption of Asian cultural traditions to Chinese post-modernism. It is part of a cycle of artworks, in which the artist interprets the doctrine of chakras. In Tantric Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism, chakras (from the Sanskrit for ‘wheel’ or ‘circle’) represent energy centers or flows that can be activated through certain meditation practices. In The Aesthetic Resonance of Chakra, Zheng uses the color qualities of the honeycomb structures and the symmetrical arrangement of individual points of color along the central axis – or axis of symmetry – of the hexagon to reference the doctrine of the chakras, reinterpreting it through an abstract/geometrical language of shapes.