China: Facing Reality( Volume 1 )

In this volume the Viennese Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig collaborates with the National Museum of China to present an overview of contemporary art in China. The survey opens with an assessment of the Cynical Realism movement, that defiant brand of (mostly) painting which developed in the more liberal cultural climate after the death of Mao Zedong. In the visual vocabulary of Cynical Realism, human figures are often grotesquely exaggerated by the clarity of their rendering, facial expressions are subtly or explicitly contorted and crowds amass in oppressive agglomerations. But as the moniker would suggest, this is not Expressionism-a certain matter-of-factness pervades the work of this movement, whose best-known exponents may be Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang. Examining younger artists such as Liu Xiaodong, Shen Ling, Chen Wenling, Cui Xiuwen and Jiu Jianhua, China Facing Reality locates a generation which has turned to digital photography, video, film and computer animation to articulate related concerns of alienation and surfeit. Works by artists such as Miao Xiaochun, Song Tao, Song Dong and Yang Zhenzhong grapple with the city as an unstable backdrop whose daily flux produces escapist worlds in which the archaic and the ultramodern permeate one another.