LOOKING BACK FOR A VIEW OF THE FUTURE
- Source: Global Times
- [10:03 August 04 2010]
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By Guo Song
Cartoons, video games, dreams and old operas … are all memories of childhood and all recorded in the works of three young Chinese artists on the brink of fame.
The group exhibition Preserving Childhood is now on display at the Aquallery Shanghai in the M50 Creative Zone, Moganshan Road's famous art district, and will run until the end of September.
The exhibition features paintings and sculptures by three Chinese artists who have not yet made their names. The works include the X-Monkey and Internet Man series by Wang Xi, the The Dream series by Li Yang, and the Model Opera series by He Diqiu.
The theme of the exhibition is childhood memories. The artists feel the rapid development of science and technology has resulted in increasing similarities between childhood and adulthood. "But the world of art cannot live without perception, purity, openness and creativity - all the characteristics of a child," said Lu Huan, a curator at the Shanghai Art Museum and the curator of this exhibition.
With their distinctive artistic creations, the three young artists combine their personal experiences and artistic skills to show how important it is to focus on, save and spotlight the memories of childhood.
Wang Xi, in his 20s, is the youngest artist in this exhibition. A graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China's oldest art college, his paintings and animations include visual elements collected from new media, cartoons, video games, advertisements and movies, showing a vivid personal language and style.
The X-Monkey series features a monkey character, based on the famous Monkey King from Journey to the West, one of the four great classic Chinese novels. The brightly colored monkey indulges himself at a high-tech home, posing as a Bruce Lee character in one instance. The other series, Internet Man, depicts a figure living in cyber space sometimes with connecting wires to a realistic head and sometimes as a Haibao recreation.
His works include references from classic movies and video games, like Transformers and The Terminator, and reflect the artist's concerns with the way society approaches happenings such as the Olympics, severe winters and the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
Wang's paintings show, to some extent, "humans' hidden fear of the machines and technologies we invented ourselves," said Han Jing, the art critic of the Contemporary Artist magazine.
Li Yang graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of the major fine art academies in China, and is recognized as a young talent who uses a variety of techniques, including oil painting, watercolors and performance art.
His video and installation work Born From Dust was shown in the exhibition Conversation 10 + 10 at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai in 2006 and received critical acclaim from Ineke Gudmundsson, the Dutch curator and director of the Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen.
"I was impressed at how clear and well executed the installation was," Gudmundsson said.
In this exhibition Li's The Dream series is a collection of the artist's dreams recorded on paper and a result of his years of studies of traditional Chinese culture. In these works the artist looks into his individual experience of reality and dreams, and questions his own perception.
"Li continuously explores the psychological information that appears in his dreams and uses these to shape his art," said Chen Zhuo, a teacher from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts.
He Diqiu was born in 1972 and has been recognized as a major sculptor with works shown in Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan. His sculpture series Model Opera is his contribution to this exhibition.
Model Opera was a reformed traditional Peking Opera loaded with political references and created during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in China. However "his representations are not Model Opera in nature," said Lu Hong, the artistic director and curator of the Shenzhen Art Museum.
