Inside Out: New Chinese Art
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
2 June - 13 August 2000
Inside Out: New Chinese Art is the first major international exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to explore the vitality and dynamic changes in Chinese culture in the late 20th century. The artists in this exhibition have been working in a period when the deeply-rooted cultural assumptions and centuries-old visual traditions are under enormous pressure from rapid modernisation, changing political realities and conflicting global, ethnic and local identities.
The exhibition explores the many ways in which the challenges of recent social, economic and cultural changes have confronted artists in mainland China and the Chinese diaspora - Hong Kong, Taiwan, and those who have emigrated to the West since the late 1980s. Inside Out presents an astonishing body of art - confronting, clever, mysterious, elegant and always thought-provoking - across the widest range of artistic media.
Consisting of nearly 90 works created in the years 1985-1998, Inside Out includes painting, sculpture, photographs, installations, videos and prints by some of the world's leading contemporary artists. The show explores many major themes including the artist's response to the globalisation and the commercialism of contemporary society; the use or rejection of cultural heritage and artistic traditions; and the relationship of the individual to society against the underlying quest for artistic identity, both in China and abroad.
Co-curated by the Asia Society in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition was first shown in late 1998 simultaneously at the Asia Society and P.S.I. Contemporary Art Center in New York.
Vishakha Desai, Director of the Asia Society Galleries in New York remarked, "These works have been selected to show the explosion of creativity among these artists in the past dozen years or so, and to convey a sense of dynamism in their work - we also hope to break down barriers between audiences of Asian and Western art - this art is Asian but it is also contemporary in an international context."
Huge installations include Xu Bing's famous Book from the Sky, with its elegant play on Chinese literary traditions in the form of nonsensical printed calligraphy. Similar themes inform Gu Wenda's ethereal enclosure, Temple of Heaven (China Monument), constructed of traditional furniture, videos and screens of human hair which also challenged conventional Chinese respect for learning.
Photography - still and video - is the preferred media of many works in Inside Out. Zhang Huan's To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond plays visual and political games with a host of naked villagers against the luminous blue surface of the pond. Other works allude to traditional Chinese art forms: in Zoon, Huang Chih-yang's grotesque figures appear in ink on hanging paper scrolls, while The Dream of China by Wang Jin creates a shimmering dragon robe from polyvinyl chloride and fishing line.
Pop remains a favourite style with Wang Guangyi's Great Castigation Series targeting the global domination of Coca Cola. Zhang Xiaogang's startling Bloodline: Family Portrait shows a blank-faced Mao-badged couple and child, figuratively and literally linked by lines of blood.
As critics of the show have pointed out "These artists have the courage to say things are changing - how am I going to deal with this?"…"This exhibition offers a promise of insight into the psyche of the awakening giant of modern China." An extensive program of performances, artists' talks, lectures and films accompanies the exhibition.
NGA - NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA
Parkes Place East, Canberra ACT 2600
