Zheng Guogu × Yangjiang Group’s exhibition ‘The Last Bet!’  blends elements of everyday life such as clothing, eating, inhabiting, travelling and even with all imaginable forms of artistic production from painting, photograph, calligraphy, installation and performance.

The artists – Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin, and their various collaborators are systematically doing things that are far beyond any established rules and totally controllable. For the last two decades, Zheng Guogu, the central figure of the group, has developed his singular and extravagant career by creating some of the most mind-blowing provocations and propositions that engage imagination and creativity with life reality in the most unique way. For the last decade, his collaborations with a few artists from his hometown Yangjiang, a remote “small”, or “second tier”, city in the south of Guangdong province, has been so extraordinarily exciting and fruitful that they formed a more or less stable “organisation” named “Yangjiang Group”. Actually, “Yangjiang Zu (陽江組)”, the original Chinese name of the group, recalls more of a mafia-like secret society in Kung-fu films than any comparable collective in art history.

Image: © Zheng Guogu, Hanart TZ Gallery