Mélanie Boucher
No. 109 – winter 2015

Starving of Sudan by Xu Zhen: Epistemology and Pragmatics of the Diorama


The term diorama entered the contemporary art lexicon in the 1990s, due mainly to a rising interest in realistic three-dimensional representations, at full or reduced scale, such as the striking works of Jake & Dinos Chapman and Paul McCarthy. Employed to designate a method rather than a genre of artwork, diorama was not defined at the time,1 and it is barely more so today. Although the term is still used, and no doubt more today than twenty years ago, it remains to be made explicit.

Retracing the evolution of the diorama to investigate its meaning and scope, and inscribing the contemporary art diorama epistemologically and pragmatically within the history of a term and its practices, is a promising move. Although the contemporary art diorama invests and appropriates the dioramic forms that preceded it, it is not the same as the museum-related diorama; nor is either type of device reducible to Daguerre’s invention dating from 1822.2 Theme parks of all sorts, small-scale models and children’s toys are other types of dioramas, of which only the first invents or re-creates life-size environments3 based on trompe-l’oeil. The illusion generated by the scale to reproduce or suggest reality is the determining factor. This is true of Starving of Sudan (2008), Xu Zhen’s controversial work, which is used here for inductive purposes to envisage the life-size diorama. In this work, the floor of a Beijing gallery was covered with straw, and the walls with trees. An automaton of a vulture


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