Born in China

The majority of works in this exhibition are by prominent artists, all born in China, and now mostly in their forties. Their work is a vivid pictorial illustration of the explosive creative historical moment that culture in China is currently traversing.

What is happening is that artists, confronted with a uniquely radical transformation of society, find themselves with a similar intellectual challenge as Cezanne and Picasso, Stravinsky and Debussy at the beginning of the 20th century, namely the need to develop a new pictorial and musical (and later literary) language to express the changed reality of the new century.

The situation now, at the start of a new century, is extremely interesting and is featured in the present exhibition. The urgency amongst artists in the last decade to make up for lost time, duplicated in the frantic modernization of the country in general, has given way to a more assured and measured group of artistic styles. There is a less subservient attitude toward Western modernism in general and the distorting expectations of the Western art-market in particular. Furthermore, there has emerged, as an important consequence, a growing confidence both in China's role in the modern world and in artists' ability to identify and check the political and social deformations that could undermine it.

The artists in this exhibition vary widely in style and aesthetic objectives although most remain conscious of the need to engage with the issues engendered by the transformation of Chinese society and the dislocation of her culture.

Documenting the polished, new world of urban life, Chen Wenbo concentrates on clinical descriptions of the accoutrements of prosperity. Feng Zhengjie is absorbed by the glamour of the entertainment industry in his vulgar, vacant blow-ups of young women's faces, which relate obliquely to He Sen's haunting depictions of adolescent girls' disconsolate dreaming of just such glamorous lives.







Guo Wei paints young children—his own daughters and her friends—and his disturbing distortions evoke in a different way the uneasiness prevalent in contemporary Chinese society.

Lu Peng, on the other hand, depicts a crowded and chaotic world, with no attempt at psychological analysis—just the compulsive pace of Chinese urban life today. Wu Mingzhong describes the more overtly political aspect of society, satirizing critical moments of supposed victory and defeat.

Yan Lei, now one of the most sought-after artists in China, addresses the dynamic between foreign curators/collectors and Chinese artists and the balance of power inherent in such relationships. Yang Shaobin, another "hot" artist basking in international acclaim, describes power struggles in terms of painterly works suffused with violence.

Yu Hong, a beautiful woman artist who is also an exceptionally gifted painter, depicts a totally different world of domestic life reduced to its essentials—serene and unchanging despite the backdrop of political change.

So, although as will be seen in these works, the artistic environment is extremely complex in China today, with striking regional differences and many different styles, some more traditional, others more Western, jostling for prominence, a new sensibility has taken hold in the last few years. It has enabled Chinese artists, for the first time in a century, to face up to international criteria with quiet self-confidence—no longer the idiosyncratic chroniclers of a desperate and mysterious passage in history but men and women willing and able to compete on their own terms as artists of the world.