MadeIn Company

MadeIn Company was established in Shanghai in 2009 by the artist Xu Zhen, born in 1977 in Shanghai. Xu Zhen studied at the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts, majoring in Design and Decoration, and graduated in the late 1990s, though the exact graduation year is not confirmed in public sources. Rather than working under his own name for this project, Xu Zhen structured MadeIn Company as a corporate entity, with himself as director, producing sculpture, installation, and other multidisciplinary work credited to the company as a whole.

In 2014 MadeIn Company established MadeIn Gallery in Shanghai, a commercial gallery that represents a roster of other artists rather than MadeIn Company itself. The company's own exhibition history, as documented by the City of Vancouver's public art registry, includes ShanghART Gallery and Long March Space, along with institutional presentations at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, IKON Gallery in Birmingham, Kunsthalle Bern, and the Hayward Gallery in London, as well as exhibitions with White Cube and participation in the Shanghai, Busan, and Kiev biennials. Exact years for these engagements are not confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile.

A note on naming: the mononym Madein is also used by an unrelated, currently active Korean idol group formed in 2024. This profile concerns only the Shanghai art collective, MadeIn Company, which is the entity relevant to the contemporary art market.

Institutional descriptions of MadeIn Company, including those from White Cube and the City of Vancouver's public art registry, frame the collective's "contemporary art creation corporation" structure as a deliberate provocation aimed at the conventions of individual authorship in contemporary art. No verbatim quotes from named critics in major outlets about MadeIn Company could be confirmed in the available research, so none are reproduced here.

No confirmed public auction record for a work attributed to MadeIn Company, to Xu Zhen under the MadeIn Company name, or to "Madein" as a market name has been identified as of 2026-07-16. The collective's corporate production model means that any works reaching auction could be catalogued under variant credit lines, such as Xu Zhen individually, MadeIn Company, or MadeIn, which complicates building a single, continuous price history. Collectors should independently verify any specific auction result, lot attribution, and provenance before treating it as representative of the company's market.

The most important fact for any collector to hold onto is one of identity. Madein is a name shared by an unrelated, currently active Korean pop group, and the art-market entity that the name most plausibly resolves to, MadeIn Company, is a Shanghai collective founded by Xu Zhen rather than a single named painter or sculptor. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, no confirmed public auction record, and no confirmed museum collection holding for this entity as of this writing. Given that thin and unsettled public record, any acquisition should be preceded by direct verification of attribution and provenance with MadeIn Company, one of its exhibiting galleries such as ShanghART Gallery or White Cube, or MadeIn Gallery in Shanghai.