MadeIn is a new artists’ collective founded by Chinese artist Xu Zhen in Shanghai in 2009. Derived from ‘Made In’, two words that refer to manufacturing (with country of origin not specified), the name also phonetically translates into Chinese for ‘without a roof ’ (‘méi d???ng’), thereby suggesting an openness to the collective’s work.

Xu Zhen himself is one of the most renowned conceptual artists to have emerged from China since the 1990s, but now he is playing down his personal identity. For Seeing One’s Own Eyes, MadeIn impersonates a fictional group of Middle Eastern artists. The work however is all made in China for a kind of exhibition in disguise – ‘an exhibition of an exhibition’.

Through a range of media including sculpture, video and installation, clichéd images of the Middle East such as oil, religious conflict and war raise issues of cultural perception. MadeIn encourages us to take a clearer view of current affairs in the region. A recent work titled Hey, are you ready? (2009–2010) is comprised of three large white sculptures made from polystyrene, one of many by-products derived from the distillation of oil. These objects form neat, crisp packaging for the protection of loaded symbols – mosques, crescents, oil barrels and Kalashnikov rifles – revealed by embodied negative space.

The bleak media picture of the Middle East, as a war-torn part of the world, associated with death, violence, human suffering and religious turmoil, is pervasive. In Perfect Volume (2009) the toe-ends of combat desert boots create a circle on the floor; it is a row of absent soldiers, imagined casualties, turned in on itself. Calm (2009) is an installation made of building debris, a carpet of bits of brick and rubble that is unremarkable at first glance. Slowly it reveals itself as animate, gently moving up and down as if breathing like the survivor of a bomb blast, trapped and awaiting rescue. Destructive power likewise features in The Colour of Heaven (2009) where mushroom clouds  from atomic bomb explosions are encased under assorted glasses.

The title of MadeIn’s exhibition refers to a verse in the Koran: “My way, and that of my followers, is to call you to God, on evidence as clear as seeing with one’s own eyes” (Sura 12, verse 108). Freely translated it is an appeal for critical refection; a consideration of how we see – by “seeing one’s own eyes” – as much as what we see.

Ikon’s presentation is the first European exhibition by MadeIn and is organised in collaboration with S.M.A.K., Belgium.