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| CHENG RAN Ghost of Tundra #1, 2010 |
Over the past decade, while the West consumed new art from China, a new generation of Chinese artists also imagined America as the center of contemporary art discourse. "Catch the Moon in the Water: Emerging Chinese Artists" - at James Cohan Gallery- showcases a group of young Chinese artists and their thoughts and responses to America as an exotic and remote source of inspiration.
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| GUO HONGWEI On The Frontier (Chu Shai), 2011 Watercolor on paper |
Quoted from Song Dynasty poet Huang Tingjian's verse, “Seize the flower in the mirror, catch the moon in the water,” the exhibition title refers to the fruitlessness of capturing the moon from its reflection. This idiom takes on special meaning when applied to the West's preoccupation with certain stereotypes in contemporary Chinese art – images of the Red Guards, Mao Zedong and panda bears – as well as to the fetishized mass-consumption of cultural objects that satisfy its imagination of a new China in transformation.
Rather than play into the curatorial hype in portraying the emerging generation of Chinese artists – a current trend in the international art world – "Catch the Moon in the Water" reverses these roles to illustrate how this young cohort's imagining of America has influenced their work.
The exhibition opens with the allegorical short film, Will/We Must by Zhou Tiehai, which the artist produced in 1996 when he was 30 years old. Through a series of metaphors, this film depicts some of the harsh realities in the Chinese art world in the 1990s, and remains poignant in the context of this exhibition for its reflection on the restriction that continues to challenge the current generation of young artists.
Double Fly Art Center’s video, Contemporary Business (2010), is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a hit Mandarin pop song, Love Business (Ai Qing Mai Mai). Members of the collective dance and pose in front of a portable video camera, singing their discontent with their perceived abuse of curatorial powers.
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| CHEN WEI Records Hypnosis, 2007 |
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| LIANG YUANWEI Oval, 2011 |