Zhou Siwei

    BIOGRAPHY

    Zhou Siwei (b. 1981, Chongqing) currently lives and works in Shanghai. In 2005, he completed BA in Oil Painting from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

    Zhou Siwei focuses on the interrelation between people’s understanding of culture and the effect of culture on people. In his work, several visual and cultural inertias are intertwined to develop new intentions and suggestions, and familiarity and strangeness emerge at the same time, only to leave the possibility of arbitrary interpretation.

    Selected solo exhibitions: I am Your Car, I’m Thinking About You, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2025)；I Sold What I Grow, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2024); New Phone for Every Week, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2020); The Last Bridge, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, Germany (2019); Beautify Home, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2017); Schematic, Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland (2015); A Round Studio, Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai, China (2014); Twilight, 82 Republic, Hong Kong, China (2007) and among others.

    Selected group exhibitions: Sequence, Beige, Brussels, Belgium (2025); Pictures of the Post-80s Generation: Generational Leap, Tank, Shanghai (ongoing, 2024); Weaving in Entanglement, Mending in Punctures, 69 Art Campus, Beijing, China(2024); Follow the Feeling, times museum, Guangzhou, China(2024); Project Space Opening: Antenna-Tenna, Antenna-Tenna, Shanghai, China(2024); Horizons: Is there anybody out there?, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2023); Blink – The Collection of Trond Mohn, Stavanger Art Museum of Fine Arts, Norway (2023); House of Perception, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2021); Normal Days, Antenna Space x POP-UP Gallery, OōEli, Hangzhou, China (2020); Those who see and know all, are all and can do all, 798 Art Center, Beijing, China (2020); Blasted Heath, A.M.180, Prague, Czech (2019); Emerald City, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, China (2018); Transcendental Empathy, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2018); I Could See the Smallest Things, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2017); Guangzhou Image Triennial: Simultaneous Eidos, Guangzhou, China (2017); Huayu Youth Award: Inception, Sanya, China (2016) and among others.

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    Artworks

    EXHIBITIONS

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    ARTICLES

    • CURA Magazine｜Zhou Siwei: I Sold What I Grow | Giulia Colletti

      In the context of the exhibition I Sold What I Grow at the Vienna Secession, Zhou Siwei translates the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life, particularly in China, into whimsical and fragmented artworks. These pieces delve into the ambivalence of the digital age, the rampant flow of trade, and the relentless pace of late capitalism. Zhou’s works merge together visual and cultural references, making everyday objects and symbols appear both familiar and uncanny, thus inviting diverse interpretations.

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    • Painting in the Time of Technophoria – On Zhou Siwei’s art practice and his latest solo exhibition “New Phone for Every Week” | Fiona He

       
      What does an ordinary day look like for most us nowadays? You are likely to reach for your mobile phone before your mind is fully turned on. Your home screen, filled with notifications from last night while you slept, shines brighter than your serenading alarm. You get ready, and rush to the nearest subway station. With a swipe of your e-wallet on your phone, you hop on the subway while the transit fare is instantly deducted from your bank account. For that matter, you can hardly remember the last time you saw paper money. On your commute to work, you shuffle between the multiple messenger apps and social media platforms to catch up with the “world.” If time allows, you indulge in a few video clips on YouTube or even try to level up with your teammates in the “Honor of Kings.” Meanwhile, infomercials moving along subway cart windows with a few occasional glitches, as if the underground tunnels have built-in screens that stretch from one station to the next, compete for your attention. But you have long been indifferent, or even desensitized to advertisements, be they in motion, looped, or still. Once you get to work, whatever your job may be, it’s likely you operate on some kind of monitor, if not on multiples. Your proficiency in all of the devices at work is has become your second nature, which does not require any forethought. And, by the time you get off work, the city’s nocturnal atmosphere revels on with artificial stimuli that keep all of your sensory responses alive. Although you might not be able to identify the great dipper, but the night sky lusters with a constellation of hundreds of drones into silhouettes of images, glyph, or even propaganda slogans that are easier for you to recognize than the stars. The high-rise buildings and menacing towers, key players of the urban jungle in the daytime, contending for a city’s skyline, have now turned into plugged monoliths, on which infomercials roll on in endless syncopation. Well, you get the picture. In fact, a verbal narrative, or a single image would not suffice to portray our daily routine, and perhaps the reception of such narratives string together faster into a mental video clip than it’s told……

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    • Zhou Siwei: Aesthetic Research | Bao Dong

       
      Like many artists from the same generation, Zhou Siwei’s art practice departed from an intentional distancing from the academic and especially, the realist art. Chinese realist art usually has double identities, one is considered as aesthetic values and ideological contents, serving as the basis of art-related policy making which is supported and directed by political parties and the government. It used to be the only legitimate model, including reflectionism, class theory, exemplarism, namely a series of aesthetic principles beyond mediums and genres such as “content dictates form.” The second identity of realism is the methodology of realism that’s conducting the aesthetic form as such within art, based upon representational skills, centred upon historical figures while aiming at literary and social expressions. Extending towards the capillary tips, this methodology also includes painting geometric solids, plaster figures, heads and bodies, and finally the thematic works. In short, this is what’s still being taught in the conventional departments of every art school in China. The two identities of realism are interconnected, in fact, they are the same thing, in English Realism can mean both Xieshizhuyi and Xianshizhuyi.

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