Robert Zhao Renhui on display at Tate Modern

Zhao's work "A Guide To The Flora And Fauna Of The World" is on display together with Salvador Dalì Lobster Telephone
Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to announce that Singaporean artist Robert Zhao’s celebrated project A Guide To The Flora And Fauna Of The World has been acquired by the renowned Tate collection and it's now on display in the exhibition "Materials and Objects".
 
Originally commissioned for the 2013 Singapore Biennale, the work takes the form of an unconventional encyclopaedia, documenting organisms altered by human intervention. 
The multidisciplinary artist was recently selected to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2024, where he presented an exhibition that continues his longstanding engagement with the relationship between nature and culture.
Dr Sook-kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at Tate’s Hyundai Research Centre: Transnational, emphasized the acquisition’s significance: “This work stood out for its formal and thematic strength in questioning humankind’s relationship with nature.” She noted that it also expands Tate’s representation of Southeast Asian art and enhances its holdings in contemporary photography.
The acquisition, which took over two years to finalize, marks a milestone for Zhao.
 

A Guide To The Flora And Fauna Of The World is accompanied by an artist book – designed by Hanson Ho and Stephanie Ng – which won the Design of the Year award at the President’s Design Award and the Gold Pencil from the New York One Show Design Annual Awards in 2014.

 

Through surrealism and speculation, the artworks in this room disrupt our assumptions about the world around us

 

Robert Zhao Renhui’s catalogue of plants and animals, A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World, is full of unexpected discoveries.

On the walls of the gallery, Zhao presents excerpts from the catalogue. These describe how different species have evolved in response to human intervention and changing environments.

Some of these narratives are based on real scientific findings, while others are imagined and hypothetical proposals. The guide is issued by The Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ), a fictional institution invented by the artist. It mimics encyclopaedic traditions to explore the limits of human systems of knowledge.

In a new text Zhao has written for the display, he imagines Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone as one of the specimens recorded by the ICZ. Lobster Telephone is a classic example of a surrealist object. Surrealist artists aimed to liberate the mind by exploring the power of dreams and the unconscious. Dalí believed unexpected combinations of objects – like the lobster and telephone – could reveal the secret desires of our unconscious minds.

Both Dalí and Zhao explore a space beyond reality and rationality to speculate about alternative forms of knowledge.

 

More info about the artwork.

More info about the exhibition

June 12, 2025
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