The September Issue

Influenced by fashion design, publishing and scenography, Bruno Zhu works in the space of fiction to rewrite agency, authorship, consumption and power. In 2015, Zhu included a prototype edition in his exhibition New Arrivals at FOAM Amsterdam: a wall calendar depicting the artist’s mother in a series of Chinese glamour photoshoots. Almost a decade after its making, 5b is proud to publish the work in a new format, devised in close collaboration with the artist. The sequence begins on September 1972—the month and year of the artist’s mother’s birth, the year of the Mouse—and continues on a twelve-year cycle, spanning 132 years. Across each page, she is presented anew, surrounded by messages of love and longing: a new outfit, a new scenario, a new moment—ever beautiful, ever hopeful. Titled The September Issue, the project constitutes an early example of Zhu’s interest in working with family members, using their images and his own to reassess and reimagine nuclear familial archetypes, approaching them, in his own words, as “a set of characters or agents that can reconstruct a scene, that exists halfway between a symbolic plane and an affective one.”Bruno Zhu lives and works between Portugal and the Netherlands. Recent projects include presentations at Veronica in Seattle, What Pipeline in Detroit, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich in Zurich, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Geneva. He is a member of A Maior, a curatorial program set in a home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.

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