Location: Building 1, No. 10 JianGuo Middle Road, HuangPu District, Shanghai

Exhibition Dates: 21 March – 25 May, 2025

Open Hours: Tue-Sat, 11:00 – 20:00

Cheruby is pleased to present ‘Taste’, an exhibition of new commissions by artist Andrew J. Greene, curated by Harriet Min Zhang. This exhibition is an inquiry into how to make “good” decisions at a time when the collective pursuit of ‘more and better’ obscures a culture in decline. Success or happiness is not a zero sum game, but the perpetuated insistence of this ‘do or die’ fantasy is an effective means of coercion. We are baited into accepting conditions where absurd propositions and dangerous bets are part of day-to-day life.

In a culture of repetition and automation – in manufacturing, in the production of knowledge, and in our conception of ourselves – we only begin to envision healing or repair in times of crisis. On one hand, we are liberated beings capable of making decisions and are responsible for outcomes, and, on the other, we are clueless, if not powerless to factors out of our control. Our lives are filled with abstraction and uncertainty, and the only way we can make heads or tails of it is through intuition.

Greene’s work creates a space for us to use our intuition. Swans, dress shoes, legal scales, running horses, and decision making coins are all symbols that represent how we distort and displace our beliefs into bets and gambles. These objects and symbols exist in our periphery – as a knick-knack on a desk, or an aluminium decoration welded to a gate – things that are made to not be as much thought about as they are to be passed by. They are part of a lexicon of symbols used to promote ideas of individual wealth and success while also operating as metaphysical raw materials that house our collective desires and anxieties. Greene documents life with these objects and invites us to rethink the intricate meanings behind them.

Artist

Andrew J. Greene remakes or re-stages symbols and scenes from contemporary consumerist culture. The collective desires and emotions projected onto the objects and spaces of commerce are a metaphysical raw material that Greene mines to reverse engineer meaning. At a time when there is little consensus about what is true or real, Greene’s sculptures are a meditation on this uncertainty. Greene uses class, taste, and aspiration as materials whose relationships are as certain or uncertain as the material relationships between his sculptures. Greene’s work operates like a circus mirror –  to reflect, with comedic absurdity and abstraction, our relationship to the personal, political, economic, and societal factors that inform how we construct identities and express ourselves.

Curator

Harriet Min Zhang is an independent curator and writer, with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and a Master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art. She explores approaches to cross-disciplinary collaborations between anthropology and contemporary art and cultural practices. She considers ethnography as a research method and the notion of an interpretive thick description as the essential for a contextualised understanding of artistic practices. She recognises nuances among different disciplines and bodies of knowledge and contests situations of conjuring and myth-making that regenerate aesthetic and epistemological codes.