Leonardo Shanzhai

MADE IN CHINA is a parody of art transformed into just another product to be marketed on the global marketplace…
MADE IN CHINA is also a metaphor for that standardized and homogenized art—indistinguishable, globalist, internationalist, uprooted within today’s uniform universality…
MADE IN CHINA is an innovative ready-made and an unpredictable reassembly; it is a creative accident in the ability to revisit that exotic and foreign Western creative iconography…
MADE IN CHINA is not merely a banal copy but, even more so, a creation—that “shanzhai” which is not simply imitation, but rather reinvention…
MADE IN CHINA is postmodernism in an Eastern key; it is that sweetened kitsch, a new revolutionary figurative language and a strong, innovative hallmark of art yet to come…
MADE IN CHINA is also a parody of today’s Italian art—and not only—forced and resigned to sell itself off, to dissolve, to withdraw, perhaps even to disappear, now peripheral, decentralized, marginal if not merely collateral…
MADE IN CHINA is likewise an opportunity to reintroduce themes and subjects now obsolete, if not forgotten—perhaps simply out of fashion—such as sacred art, perhaps deemed inadequate, rejected and abandoned, once a cornerstone and foundation of Western figurative culture…
MADE IN CHINA is available in an “ordinary edition” as well as a “luxury edition,” a parody of the excess and abuse of finishes and materials, a parody of that market and those fairs of splendor and redundancy where art is primarily creative luxury to be displayed, possessed, and flaunted…