On Exhibit: Between Past and Future
Chinese Landscape-Tattoo 1999
This exhibition will be the first to comprehensively consider the outpouring of photo-based art taking place in China since the mid-1990s.The works offer a range of individual responses to the changes in China's economic, social and cultural life in the past decade.
Untitled Installation (detail) 1996-2004
Featuring 130 works by 60 Chinese artists, many of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the United States, the exhibition reflects the enthusiastic use of media-based art by younger Chinese artists.
Night Revels of Lao Li (detail) 2000
The Western masters' techniques, as well as their social and artistic aspirations, influenced a generation of young Chinese photographers who began to produce photographs reflecting the reality of life in contemporary China.
1/30th of a Second "Underwater"
Using a wide variety of media, from painting and sculpture to video and photography, China's experimental artists have explored the dynamics of an emerging "modernity with Chinese characteristics" in a country where the forces of tradition still retain enormous power.
East Village, Beijing, 1994
Arising from a culture that has traditionally been marked by the subordination of the individual to the collective, this work reflects the emergence of hybrid new conceptions of selfhood and personal identity in contemporary China.
Liu Lan, 2003
Photography gradually developed from a propaganda tool into an important vehicle of individual expression. Unofficial exhibitions began to be mounted in 1979-80, immediately attracting a huge audience.
Memories (Me), 2000
Starting in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, a large number of experimental artists relocated from the provinces to major urban centers such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, reinventing themselves as independent artists working for international exhibitions and a global art market.
Three Women at a Country Funeral, 2000
Many changes in the world of Chinese experimental art are related to national developments of profound transformations in the decades since the end of the Cultural Revolution of 1976.
Jiangbeicheng, Looking Toward Chongquing City, 2003
In the past two decades, China's urban life has been completely transformed. A massive building program has created sprawling skyscraper cities, and at the same time tens of thousands of city dwellers have been displaced from the inner city to the outskirts.
Tattoo 1, 1997
In the mid-1990s, Chinese photography entered a new phase, becoming closely linked to an ongoing avant-garde art movement. Since then, a brand of image-making often referred to by Chinese artists and critics as "experimental photography" has grown into a broad trend.
