ArtSlant - The Big World

by Kristen Carter

The Big World: Recent Art from China

Chicago Cultural Center

78 E. Washington St., Chicago, IL 60602

April 25, 2009 - August 30, 2009

Today, the market for Chinese art is widely reported to be among the fastest growing in the world. The country’s growing mega-cities and booming economy are reasons for a dynamic and thriving contemporary art scene worth noting and seeing.

Gregory G. Knight and Tereza de Arruda, co-curators of “The Big World” at the Chicago Cultural Center, have put together a show featuring twenty artists that critically explore urban life, the human condition, and the collective ideology of people living within a large, diverse, and transforming world.

The show features works in a range of media, from conceptual photographs, to figurative paintings, to installations and video. The artists selected are emerging and not widely known; making this show an exciting and fresh discovery of both talent and a country I know little about.

Xiong Yu. Falconer, 2008. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chinablue Gallery.

The show juxtaposes themes played out by humor, irony, and depictions of a stark reality. The ethereal and strange figures illustrated in Xiong Yu’s oil paintings are so intriguing in their strange and ambiguous play between the familiar, abstract and the exotic. Jin Shi’s Retail Business: Karaoke No. 2 is an installation which integrates video footage of a strip club into a portable cart, ones used by street vendors, which is surrounded by inviting lights and an area for viewers to sit, participate and stare, thus revealing to us an illicit world made pretty and fun.

Many of the artists simply examine what it means to be a part of modern society, especially one with a growing urban population. Zhao Liang’s film City Space depicts a series of banal, everyday-like scenes recorded on the street, revealing the various, sometimes disturbing, sometimes amusing, yet always honest interactions between people. Even the more abstract piece by Yin Xuizhen, a large sculptural work constructed of used clothing and stainless steel references a large, bleeding heart, and speaks to the interconnectedness of all people, despite the always prevalent pull towards isolation and dehumanization on behalf of a changing world.

--Kristen Carter

(top image: Wang Qingsong, The Glory of Hope, 2007. Courtesy of Chinablue Gallery.)

Posted by Kristen Carter on 6/29 | tags: figurative painting video-art installation