From another angle

Conceptual artist Zhu Jia has taken his solo exhibition to Singapore for the first time, featuring his most recent project The Face of Facebook.

Zhu says his switch from brush and canvas to camera and lens was quite accidental. He was given a camera to shoot a friend's wedding ceremony and he forgot to turn it off. Later he found the captured images were surprisingly interesting.

Zhu's first video work that won international acclaim is a 27-minute video titled Forever. The camera was tied to the wheel of a tricycle to capture spinning and vortex-like footage of a street scene in Beijing. The work is featured in his current exhibition.

Art captures Singapore

"Reeling and bizarre, the video outlines a unique visual experience of familiar city scenes observed from an odd angle," Xue says.

The photographic series Did They Have Sexual Relations?, featuring eight black- and-white snapshots, is Zhu's other major work, created one year after Forever.

Zhu asked an assistant to hold a panel with the above - mentioned sentence in Chinese, in front of randomly chosen couples on the street. The panel appears to be a kind of imposed accusation to an unattested crime.

"I found that the lens is not the lens itself, it's your mind; it's not your view, but a subjective imagination in your mind. However, I think the lens itself is strong and aggressive. It comes with the kind of non-negotiable usurpation. There are a lot of things you have no way to discuss openly at that time. I would describe this feeling as 'a soft knife'," Zhu says.

As a conceptual artist, Zhu believes the medium is the last thing to worry about while the thinking is key. Zhu says he believes conceptual art has never really blossomed in China.

The best time was during the 1980s and 1990s, Zhu says, when art had strong connection with other fields. The peak was the group exhibition Another Long March - Chinese Conceptual Art in the 1990s held in the Netherlands in 1997,which Zhu believes was "a group show of the highest quality even looking back at today".

The honeymoon period of Chinese conceptual art ended in 2000 when the capital market invaded the Chinese art world, Zhu says. The value of an artwork or an artist is increasingly defined by auction price.

"I might have edged away too far, but still, honesty makes me fearless," concludes the artist.