“Nowadays, what can art venture build or change? What kind of aesthetic and spiritual breakouts can artistic experimentation give?

On September 6th 2009, a geographically incompatible dream, confusing time and space, will happen in BizArt Art Center. For the project “Military Exercises Camp” an operation of international hostages’ rescue will be held in the exhibition space.

Video scenes and “material evidences” of the military performance will be presented together; while “war correspondents” will fully report the process of military exercises. Visitors will become insiders and have access to “real-time information”. Everything will be related to each visitor’s incidental joys and sorrows, no one will be outsiders!

Set in a CS game fight where players are real people, “Military Exercises Camp” will put in opposition various complex politics and military affairs,. The exhibition space will be turned into the last stage of this labyrinthine military exercises camps.” (Zhou Xiaohu)

About the artist

Born in 1960 in Changzhou, Zhou Xiaohu is a new media artist working and living in Shanghai. He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chengdu, China in 1989 and participated to various international and national exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale, the Chengdu Biennale, "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China" at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Smart Museum (Chicago) and the International Center of Photography (New York), “the Real Thing, Contemporary Art from China”, Tate Liverpool. He lives and works in Shanghai, China. 

Zhou Xiaohu’s works mainly consist in videos and installations focusing on social-related issues: mass media, politics, rights, economy, etc. with a certain satirical point of view. He is mainly known for his works “Utopian Machine” 2002 and “Crowd around” 2003, where animation films (among the earliest ones in the Chinese contemporary art scene) present various social and political scenes with characters made of clay.