Young Chinese shatter stereotypes
Under-30 collective not willing to create works from country’s more recognizable symbols
Jul 19, 2007 04:30 AM
Iain Marlow
Staff ReporteR
The framed images scattered around Siya Chen’s ground level studio off Jones Ave. are jolting.
One: a photograph showing the bottom half of a squatting woman in pink fishnets, vomiting milky bile. Another: a cartoonish illustration of two kneeling, mouthless dolls in knee-highs and panties.
Chen, a first-time curator, has compiled some startling work from Chinese contemporary artists under 30 for an exhibit at XSPACE gallery. Only one of the artists has ever been shown in North America.
The exhibit – coyly and aptly titled “No Pandas: Passion. Sex. Love. China!” – is designed to shatter stereotypes of Chinese art, including impressions that Chinese artists can’t be iconoclastic, Chen says.
Much of it is by the “Guangzhou Gang,” an unofficial collective of young artists who live in south China’s brash megalopolis.
Chen can relate to their motivation: she grew up near Guangzhou herself and does freelance media work for some of the edgy Chinese magazines that will be on display at the exhibit.
“A lot of them feel like they can do anything,” she says, flipping through some illustrations. “I think they’re really daring.”
China’s young visual artists inhabit a nation now undergoing rapid economic and cultural change. But the Chinese art now popular with collectors – selling for millions at Sotheby’s – is being created by artists who experienced a much different country growing up.
Ai Wei Wei is one of these and is probably China’s most famous contemporary artist. He helped design Beijing’s Olympic stadium and is known for politicized pieces. But then was Mao. This is now.
The artists featured in Chen’s exhibit are of the “new, new generation,” those who will be famous – not now, but in 10 years.
“They might not be mature yet. They might not be making big bucks yet. But there’s no reason they couldn’t be,” Chen says.
As in Spain after the fall of its dictator, Francisco Franco, in the 1970s, China’s youth is playing a compressed game of cultural catch-up – most obvious in illustrator Mee’s depiction of numerous and simultaneous Volkswagen orgies.
But unlike Spain, China’s booming economy is remaking its cities’ physical landscape – and altering the perceptions and lives of its youngest citizens.
“I don’t intend to document the changes to the cities … they are mostly a backdrop for the personalities and people I capture,” writes Alex So, whose works are being shown at the exhibition.
Several photographs have as backdrops the Chinese dwellings now disappearing in an upsurge of rubble, new apartments and outrage.
Chen is careful to point out, though, that many of the new artists are merely portraying what defines them, like any artist: friendship, love, sexual tension.
And they are often passed over for established artists more willing to create art out of China’s more recognizable symbols: Mao and Cultural Revolution imagery or religious and political oppression.
“Art shouldn’t always be about big issues,” Chen says. Chen kneels down to look at one of the young artist’s illustrations – Mee’s Volkswagen orgy one – leaning against her foosball table. She laughs.
“She’s trying to tell the world that China isn’t close-minded … that a little girl can make this.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/237513
