Group Exhibition White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia
The story of modern China is one of reformations. Few nations have changed so much in so short a time, or been so traumatised in the process. In the 1890s, an emperor who ordered Western-style reforms was promptly overthrown by his courtiers. In the mid 20th century, the Maoists modernised China by force, killing all who stood in their way. When their Soviet-style reform program failed, in 1978 Deng Xiaoping launched a counter-reformation, easing the Party’s grip on people’s lives and ‘opening up’ China to the world.
Many Chinese struggled with the new freedoms and outside contacts, but artists revelled in them. Contemporary art was alien, its idioms and vocabulary borrowed from the West. But its limitless possibilities opened up artists’ imaginations. With energy, wit and finesse, they set about learning this new creative language. In doing so, they made contemporary art speak Chinese.
Today China is home to a creative reformation that is changing Chinese and contemporary art alike.
It draws inspiration from calligraphy and Impressionist painting, Taoism and the Internet, Beijing street life and global business, kung fu and genetic science. Some artists are reinventing traditional Chinese forms using video, plastic and robots. For others, the message is all that matters; their artistic language is a global one, with hardly a hint of ‘Chinese’. REFORMATION shows this vibrant avant-garde at their best: confident, audacious, commercially savvy, the boldest experimenters in what the head of China’s national art academy calls “the most experimental country in the world”.
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