Xiaopeng Zhou

How Does a Flower Bend?

2019-2023
Single-channel-video, color, 8:13 minutes, carpet, paper 29.7 X 21cm each

Since 2019, the job of teaching drawing to someone with a drawing knowledge that has its roots in the remote past, has been a source of income and a source of professional inspiration for him. Working all this time, in one or two weekly sessions of several hours, with E.S., a lady in her early 80s, Zhou has now turned into a teacher, who is also an observer, a reporting draughtsman, a conversationalist learning some more German from his student than he knew before, and a dedicated and friendly companion. Depending on each day’s weather conditions and motivation, he and E.S. sit together either in her apartment – or in a public botanical garden. Both started making drawings of the same plants, widening or concentrating their attention for external circumstances and long-term and short- term memories – or for each other. Zhou’s drawings from that exchange situation form the bigger part of the works, because it is not his intention at all to expose E.S.’s renderings of plants and other objects to the critical eye of an anonymous art public – in order to suggest futile questions like whose drawings are more “artful” or “accomplished”, which of them are considered “art” or “non-art”, if there is a visible “learning curve” or “progress” through the teacher/student set-up or not. He exposes his own perspective as the record of a long- term negotiation, a continuous re-shuffling of personal space, trust, and curiosity, a shared fight with boredom, forgetfulness, and superficiality.