Du Zhenjun has a Chinese name.
Obviously he was born in Shanghai.
It is necessary indeed to be born somewhere.
He would have been able to be born anywhere else and to carry any other name.
His first child by the way, was born in Paris this month, December 2003.
I have a feeling as I write these lines that this child already knew for a long time that he was going to be born this curious winter.
Perhaps it is the case of all true children, those that the world awaits, those that the world invites so that it can reconfigure them.
It would seem that the moment came to reconfigure the system of the world.
Du Zhenjun is a curious individual who walks in the centre of the confused west and the arts of moment by adopting a posture, difficult for the natives to understand from here: at the same moment totally involved in local customs, totally collusive in our tricks, recipes and the other small arrangements with the world, but at the same time foreign to our manners.
Du Zhenjun is no more from here than from another place. No more from Paris than from Shanghai. No more from New York than from Sao Paolo.
But he is, fundamentally , up to date. He is current.
Apparently Chinese. Apparently artist. Apparently integrated. Apparently docile. Apparently moldable. Apparently predictable.
But only apparently. In reality, and as he says it himself, he knows how to » play the game « . The game of the modernity, the game of current events. The game of the social intelligence.
Really this sweet and available man is a radical.
Radically light. Radically feasible. Radically political.
Radical triptych inverted by fashionable attributes.
And radically indifferent to what the labelised multimedia experts think of him.
Some use complex devices not to say anything.
He uses simple devices to say radically simple things.
But nobody else than himself knows how to say with such economy and with such humor.
I believe that it is the visiters of Zhenjun’s installations who recognize and greet.
As I do here. With pride.
Pierre Bongiovanni