If the just-closed "Half-Life of a Dream" show at SFMOMA whetted your appetite for Chinese contemporary art, BAM's "Mahjong: Art Film and Change in China" will leave you stuffed. Former Swiss ambassador to China, Uli Sigg, loaned out his collection for this three-story survey of sculptures, paintings, prints and mixed media pieces. It begins with melodramatic social-realist work.  Brawny yet rosy-cheeked workers harrow a coal mine, or build an aqueduct with the strength of their backs. In an alcove are pieces from the first post-Mao modern-art show, the later-censored "Stars Group" exhibit of 1979.

Yue Minjun's trademark life-sizes sculptures stand in regimented squads, big-headed, shrimp-pink, squinting and grinning like people being skinned alive. The world-class painter Li Songsong's portrait "Wave" is a black and white oil of Jiang "The White Boned Demon" Qing, Mao's wife. (see below)

There are a number of paintings of decadent-looking swimmers in contemporary Chinese art---perhaps some sort of reference to the controversial Three Gorges Dam? This show includes one such work, Liu Xiaodong's painting "Eating." 

Liu's swimsuit clad "Fat Grandson" was one of the most sharply pointed of the works at the SFMOMA show.  Here, the artist shows a group of bathers: five uncomfortable employees in trunks pose in front of their unsmiling boss man. Their ruddy, mottled flesh is matched by a mound of boiled crabs before them. Perhaps the most ambitious piece-and certainly the funniest--is the video and sculpture "Parade" by Zhou Xiaohu. On a 30 foot long table, dun and chocolate-colored toy-sized clay figurines represent a century of May Day parades. What begins in 1949 with Communist victory ends in sci-fi horror in 2049, with devils in battalion, soldiers on dinosaurs, and Godzilla leading the way.  

*Images, from top to bottom: Fang Lijun, "Untitled, 1995,"oil on canvas, 96" x 72," courtesy of the Sigg Collection. Yue Minjun, "2000 A.D., 2000," painted polyester; 25 figures, each 74" x 18," courtesy of Sibila Savage.  Li Singsong, "Wave, Jiang Qing, Wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, 2002," oil on canvas, 3 panels: 44" x 132" in total, courtesy of the Sigg Collection.  Liu Xiaodong, "Eating, 2000," oil on canvas, 78" x 78," courtesy of the Sigg Collection. Zhou Xiaohu, "Parade, 2003," Installation; clay figures and video, 29' x 87," courtesy of the Sigg Collection.