Xu Zhe graduated from the School of Fine Arts at Aix-en-Provence (France) in 2006. Teacher for the New Media’s department at Shanghai Art School and member of the artists’ group Zuzhi – that supports different art-related projects – he works with different mediums including sculpture, photography, video and installations.
Xu Zhe speaks of photography as a tool and he uses it only if he needs to capture his intention. Strongly inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s film esthetics, he draws a similarity between totalitarian governments described by his masters and China’s current communist government.
Using props and models as well as real things, such as clouds to add to the narrative of his works, he depicts a reality that can be perceived as quite sinister and threatening and that suggests a violent society that has lost control.