Bruno Zhu Puts Nothing on Display

In an exhibition with no artworks at Chisenhale Gallery, London, the artist subverts conventions of display

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BY Thomas McMullan in Exhibition Reviews | 13 JAN 25

Bruno Zhu’s solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery presents the viewer, initially, with two bright green doors. Each leads to a different room in a quadrant of spaces fashioned from plasterboard. Enter the left door and you’re in an empty space with a purple floor and walls coloured red, green, yellow and blue. Travel clockwise and you’re in a room bare except for a set of large, mirrored vitrines with apertures shaped like card suits. Pass through a door in this room and you’re met with nothing but a large bow on the wall. Finally, you encounter a room clad in kitsch Victorian decor. But something in this room is wrong: the ceiling mouldings are on a wall; wallpaper is on the floor; the room is lying sideways, it seems. Two last doors present themselves: one to exit, one to return to the colourful room on what could be an endless loop.

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Bruno Zhu, License to Live, 2024, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy: the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London; photograph: Andy Keate 

Zhu’s installation, License to Live (2024), is a demonstration of sorts. As the exhibition literature explains: the four interconnected rooms are not artworks themselves, but spaces with specific rules for any works that might be displayed therein. ‘Room one’ details a particular colour-scheme (e.g., ‘Every surface facing south is painted in Scheele’s green’) and any artwork in the room must be of the same colour as the surface against which it is displayed. In ‘Room two’, objects must be displayed inside the card suit vitrines. Everything in ‘Room three’ must be dressed with a bow (even gallery assistants or security guards, should they be present), while all items in ‘Room four’ have to follow its topsy-turvy orientation: an object which would normally be placed on the floor of the room, for instance, must be affixed to the wall that has been decorated with interlocking parquet floorboards. 

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Bruno Zhu, License to Live, 2024, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy: the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London; photograph: Andy Keate 

These spaces are ripe with symbols wrung of their original meaning. The French playing cards suits, for example, have their roots in weaponry and social stratification: spades stem from the Old Spanish word spado (sword); diamonds originally symbolized the merchant class; clubs traditionally represented peasants. As Zhu, who initially trained in fashion design, observes in the exhibition literature: he is interested in how graphics can infiltrate a visual culture and, in the process, be hollowed of their lineage; for most contemporary viewers, for instance, the spade symbol brings to mind none of its violent historical roots. By foregrounding these ubiquitous, seemingly innocuous symbols, Zhu’s staging provokes interesting questions about the lingering power of commercial, class and colonial histories in icons and traditions of display.

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Bruno Zhu, License to Live, 2024, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy: the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London; photograph: Andy Keate 

Gift bows on artworks and flipped stately rooms are fun if rather on-the-nose subversions, but the most potent of Zhu’s interventions isn’t the most obvious. Scheele’s green, which the artist asked to be painted on several surfaces throughout the installation, was hugely popular in the late-18th century, used in wallpapers, textiles, bookbindings, children’s toys and even as a food colourant. In the early 19th century, reports spread of children wasting away in bright green bedrooms, but it was only in the mid-1800s that the poisonous potential of this arsenic-containing pigment became fully understood and the colour fell out of fashion. Chisenhale Gallery has used a modern, non-toxic version of the paint, but the notion that poison could be emanating from walls and doors is unnerving, adding a sinister undertone to the playful appearance of Zhu’s funhouse. What other malignancies, the artist seems to ask, radiate from how we dress our exhibition spaces? Whether or not another institution takes up Zhu’s licence agreement, his protocols of display are effective stage directions for a drama that airs conventions we may not realize we are inhaling. 

Bruno Zhu’s ‘License to Live’ is on view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, until 2 February 

Main image: Bruno Zhu, License to Live, 2024, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy: the artist and Chisenhale Gallery, London; photograph: Andy Keate 

Thomas McMullan is a writer and artist. His debut novel, The Last Good Man (Bloomsbury) won the 2021 Betty Trask Prize. His short fiction and poetry have been published in Granta, 3:AM Magazine and Best British Short Stories, and his journalistic work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, frieze, ArtReview and BBC News. He has also worked with theatre companies and games studios in London, Amsterdam and Los Angeles, including Punchdrunk, The Chinese Room and Roll7 (Bafta: Best British Game, 2023). 

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