Zheng Guogu was born in 1970 in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, China, and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. Zheng is a highly versatile artist whose practice spans performance art, photography, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and environmental art. His works often merge diverse elements to explore themes of media, consumerism, and the dramatic transformations within Chinese society.

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, Zheng Guogu cast the packaging of a series of common consumer products—beer, wine, champagne, shampoo, skincare, and mousse bottles—into metal sculptures. From the moment they were cast, these metal bottles began an extremely slow process of rusting and decay, a transformation that, in theory, could last for 2,000 years! Contrary to conventional experience, these disposable containers—normally used and discarded rapidly in real life—are reimagined by Zheng as enduring works of art. Each seemingly lightweight bottle is, in fact, solid and incredibly heavy. This playful contradiction between weight and levity also conveys the artist’s questioning of people’s perceptions of materialism and wealth in the age of consumerism.