A stroll down Jay Street (Manhattan’s shortest) will yield one of the city’s most fetching and intimate galleries—Ethan Cohen Fine Arts. This small citadel for Chinese contemporary art has been around long before the hype of recent years. In fact, the gallery was the first in America to specialize in contemporary Chinese art, opening in 1987, around the same time that Chinese artists were first experimenting with a contemporary aesthetic.

As the current show will evince, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts endures as a cornerstone of contemporary relevance in the shifting and tumultuous seas of the Chinese avant-garde. Altered Traditions calls to mind an adjective rarely incurred by hot Chinese artists these days: subtlety. While each artist in the show grapples with predictable icons of Chinese identity (Mao, Buddha, and encroaching consumerism), they do so without the now banal idiom of shock-value. The show also exhibits a rare attention to painterly talent, each artist clearly revelling in the aesthetic challenges of execution as much as the affective challenges of content. To top it off, the gallery is one of the friendliest in all of Manhattan. Ethan and Patrick clearly take great delight in the work they show, and will be more than happy to tell you why.

- Sophia Powers

(*Images, from top to bottom: Xia Caomin, Qin Feng, Hu Renyi, Ai Wei Wei, & Han Xin, Altered Traditions, February 1 - March 15, 2008; Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Xie Caomin, Makeup #1 and #2, 2006, oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.  Xia Caomin, Qin Feng, Hu Renyi, Ai Wei Wei, & Han Xin, Altered Traditions, February 1 - March 15, 2008; Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Qin Feng, East Wind, West Water with small folding book, 2000, Courtesy of the artist and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.  Xia Caomin, Qin Feng, Hu Renyi, Ai Wei Wei, & Han Xin, Altered Traditions, February 1 - March 15, 2008; Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Han Xin, East is Red No.2 and No.1, 2007, oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York.)