The Departing Shore: Zheng Zicheng

Departing is a cruel verb relating to geography dislocation. Chaoshan, a self-mocking place which colloquially referred as "the end of the province and the corner of the country", is the birthplace of Zheng. The exhibition commencing with a letter sent from the sea shore 75 years ago, unfolds the chronicle including the historical transformation, social reality and daily life that have shaped the trajectory of the artist's familial lineage, echoing individual destinies with the broader tides of societal changes. In the works, the regional elements are presented repeatedly, thus forming an enigmatic and surreal narrative.The profound sense of displacement and estrangement was inherent in the collective memory of Chaoshan inhabitants, whereby the notion of “hometown" has transformed into an strange land, assuming the helplessness of an altered identity with the passage of time.

Departing beyond its literal connotations, embracing a poetic resonance that finds its embodiment along the southern coast—a region characterized departing as a nomadic experience and an aria shaped by wind, sea, sun and rain. Embedded within Zheng’s works, the ancestral beliefs and custom prevalent in his coastal upbringing have seamlessly interwoven to his artistic expressions akin to the involuntary reflexes of muscle memory. However, Zheng has no intention of recreating the past. Instead, he always hovers in a middle ground, searching for a delicate emotional threshold between family and individual, history and emotion, truth and fiction.

Nowadays, in the bright flashes of the screen, "post-humans" who traverse the realms of information flow while evoking the ethos of globalization through the recitation of romantic chant seem increasingly unable to grasp the melancholy of the "unknown date of the after-meeting". In this comfortable yet ever-changing age, the grand history may have been forgotten by some, but the emotions inherent within familial bonds persistently ebb and flow within the songs of an elderly figure seated upon the Gold Coast, gazing across the river. Amidst the flickering flames and silver ash gradually extinguishing every month throughout the years, the blessings and yearnings for distant relatives that the elderly individual utters resemble a leading thread, pulling out the tales that unfolded in the South.