The largest monograph devoted to the work of Chen Zhen, including all his currently known works and the most information on the Chinese artist. Chen Zhen was a privileged witness of economic and cultural globalization, particularly of the gulf dividing China and the Western world. A stranger under his home regime and a foreigner in France, where he moved in 1986, Chen Zhen was on the margins of two systems, looking for his own way through them. In this double exile, he found himself especially receptive to cultural assimilation, which became the basic premise of his creativity. Chen Zhen's works question the world and humanity in order to establish a transcultural discourse-a new language, a new way of life taking into account a dimension that is spiritual and technological, material and immaterial all at once.
Chen Zhen's catalogue raisonne is the exhaustive inventory of the authenticated work of the artist, cataloged chronologically in two volumes: the first covers the years 1978-96, the second, 1997-present. Isabelle Renard and Xu Min's brilliant essay, guiding us through Chen Zhen's work, is one of the major contributions to this catalog: it places the artworks in their historic context and highlights the key periods in his creative development.