Ever since the early 1990s, Chinese contemporary art has been appearing in various big-scale international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale and Kassel Documenta. Stepping into the new century, Chinese contemporary art has gained an unexpected success in the commercial market: Auction records of millions of dollars are being renewed all the time; internationally renowned galleries have started to sign contracts with Chinese contemporary artists; and the artists themselves have become cover figures, attracting the attention of media just like famous politicians, film stars and business moguls… This phenomenon was course unimaginable twenty years ago, when many of the artists were still struggling for the “85 New Wave Movement”.
Under the current circumstances, certain forms and styles have accumulated enormous amounts of cultural and commercial values. As a result, even the most creative artists have to carefully maintain their relatively stable artistic languages. Many successful ones are unwilling to step out of their limited spaces or try out new possibilities. In other words, there are fewer and fewer successful individuals who dare to freely change their creative styles.
What we present to the audience this time are four artists rare in our times. They are Lu Hao, Wang Yin, Xiao Yu and Yang Maoyuan. Having achieved success long time ago, they could have happily enjoyed their fame for many years, but they are never easily satisfied with the current status. They challenge their existing styles and languages by constantly taking new actions – these new actions show great courage, and more importantly, high quality.   

Lu Hao is famous for his Plexiglas series of classic urban architecture, mechanics and furniture. The remodeling and the playful imitations of historical architecture allow us to examine our mutual experiences from a new perspective. Born and raised in Beijing, Lu Hao’s works are deeply influenced by the transformation and modernization of the city. His installations and painting series reflect upon the urban culture and are no doubt inspired by the huge and rapid changes in his living environment. With wisdom and a sense of humour, he employs a language full of contrasts and metaphors, revealing the cultural shock, psychological impact and spiritual discomfort in our society caused by the fast-paced urbanization and modernization process. Still take his Plexiglas series as an example. He creates models of traditional architectures by using a material that symbolizes industrial civilization, however, one sees within these buildings flowers, birds, fish, insects and other objects that remind one of the leisure of a traditional life. Through the clever and humorous arrangements, we can also discern an inarticulate feeling of helplessness. Lu Hao lives like a stranger in his hometown Beijing. His reinterpretation of the architectures along both sides of Chang’an Street has left an extremely deep visual and psychological impression on viewers from different countries and cultural backgrounds. Besides deliberate reinterpretation, deconstruction and reconstruction of the classic, he also cares about the fast urban development and pays attention to the international competitions between cities. In works such as Architecture Dodgem and Construction Device, he has expressed personal and highly critical views against the rapidly changing times. One sees from these works a fragile and void value system that exists within modern urban civilizations. It is worth noticing that to Lu Hao, painting has never lost its charm these years as a two dimensional way of expression. The Flower, Bird, Insect, Fish painting series showcased this time is a fresh reinterpretation of his installations of the same themes. Although mature and succinct in forms, his main focus is no longer on the painting language itself but on the conceptual space created by forms and their connotations. From this perspective, we see that these paintings no longer stay as drafts for installations, but have become independent works that have their own lives. Through an expressive language, these newly created painting series continue to reflect our inner experiences as urban dwellers. Feelings such as nostalgia, anxiety, helplessness, discontent, attachment and hope are all twisted and mixed in these works, forming a typical expression of a literati living in a transforming time.

Wang Yin’s paintings have been highly conceptual from the very beginning. In fact, many of his works were realized through “unusual methods”. It is therefore not very surprising that he has become a representative figure of conceptual painting in the Chinese contemporary art world. Wang Yin has borrowed a whole range of “unusual methods”: Sometimes he would reprocess ready-made paintings bought from the market; sometimes he would hire painters and workers from different backgrounds and supervise them as they take turns to work on the same piece; sometimes he would even work directly with alternative media (such as catapult, electric blanket and spray painting cloth)… These Dadaist “composition” and “reprocessing” fill his works with a playful and ironic tone, fully combining personal memories with the game spirit of art. The purpose of his experiments is to challenge the meaning of contemporary painting with a Zen attitude. In a time when technology and media are highly developed, it has become increasingly easy to capture and record “reality”. One cannot help but wonder: What is the ultimate meaning of painting? Is painting “evolving” with time? What are the other possibilities for this art form? Are there boundaries? If there are, where are they? ... It seems that the first impression Wang Yin’s works leave us is that he is trying to retrace a history. From the themes to the artistic effects, his paintings are saturated with an intense feeling of “nostalgia”. We see within them Russian literature, Soviet Union paintings, childhood memories, classic works in art history, as well as common people in real life, vulgar commercial paintings and climate descriptions, all of which are presented in a seemingly “rough” and “old” manner. Surrounded by a nostalgic atmosphere, the viewers also experience an “estranged” feeling best captured in Brecht’s theatre plays③. Apart from an effort to retrace the history, Wang Yin also shows in his works a unique sense of realistic absurdity. As the past and the present attempt to meet and overlap, they inevitably miss each other; and as comedy and tragedy are juxtaposed by force, each loses its original meaning immediately. All themes are borrowed and all borrowed themes are abused. Under this unintentional abuse, those seemingly sacred “meanings” are reduced to their most primitive forms. Wang Yin is a traveler in the realm of public images. He leads us into his artistic territory of mind games, where he skillfully weaves history and memories with reality, creating with wisdom a new dimension that challenges the viewers’ capacity of understanding.

Xiao Yu has established a distinct personal language by juxtaposing and reconstructing biological specimens. He approaches his objects with an air of an alternative “God” and to the contemporary art world, he has become a prominent figure like Frankenstein①. Although his works often take on various visual forms, they invariably take roots in people’s psychological and physical experiences, their focus remaining on the existence of human beings and the essence of life. These works are bizarre, horrifying, thrilling and full of suspensions; however, from such powerful expressions one can detect an almost poetic feeling and a unique aesthetic. In fact this is indeed most viewers’ impression after seeing Xiao Yu’s famous collage of animal, bird, and infant specimens. The artist’s wild imagination has given birth to many new species, which carry out cruel fights in extremely absurd settings. The realistic tension of these settings fills the viewers’ minds with free associations of mutation, clone technology, environmental pollution, as well as the past and the future of human beings and the world we live in. For this exhibition, Xiao Yu has specially created a new piece: a monument designed for dogs. As one of the first tamed species, dogs have made great contribution to humans but their reputation has always been mixed. By using a flattened dog specimen, Xiao Yu reveals various meanings imposed on dogs by human society and shows us furthermore how meaningless concepts have tortured real lives. In recent years, Xiao Yu has created a series of paintings based on basic patterns that look like butterflies. These enormous “butterflies” take over whole canvases. Painted in an almost abstract fashion, their bright colours seem void and fleeting. Some of them are even immersed in vapour or crystals, leaving only an illusion that resembles tissue scans and sections. During this exhibition, Xiao Yu will also present a painting series with “grass” as its theme. Like “butterflies”, “grass” is also a symbol of the transient, beautiful and fragile life in his artistic world. They are in fact metaphors of a time that is colourful but bizarre, changing but full of uncertainties. If we interpret these images with a bolder approach, we can even say that they are neither “butterflies” nor “grass”, but the classic Rorschach ink-blots in psychology②: The abstract forms are projected onto each viewer’s mind, producing different results that reflect each viewer’s biggest concerns. Since the forms were endowed with various “meanings”, they also appear in different names.  

The formal starting point of Yang Maoyuan’s personal artistic style is closely related to his series based on animal specimens. At the beginning of the new century, he won the recognition of the contemporary art world through his series of bloated and distorted horses and sheep which resemble bizarre-looking balloons. As these deliberately processed animal specimens appeared at various big-scale contemporary art exhibitions around the world, Yang Maoyuan was also being recognized as a conceptual artist with a distinct artistic trademark, his influence gradually crossing the boundaries between countries. In fact, Yang is not an artist who would follow a linear route or stick to a fixed style. He always shows great interest and curiosity towards the things around him, and he enjoys seeing through their superficial appearances. After in-depth exploration and research of an object’s structure and essence, he would apply his understanding – even misunderstanding – to his works. It is this creative approach that has given his works their diverse and seemingly inconsistent forms. His paintings, installations, sculptures and films all appear to be rather different, but if one is careful enough, it is not very difficult to discover within them an inner coherence, which is manifested in his emphasis on objects’ basic structures and volumes, and  his deliberate misinterpretation of their original meanings. In 2005, after finding a new possibility, he created a series entitled Look Inside. It included a group of marble pieces based on plaster prototypes of classic western head sculptures. These prototypes are often used in Chinese fine arts colleges as teaching tools. By rounding and polishing all their edges, the artist fully expressed his alternative view on eastern and western attitudes towards culture, philosophy, aesthetics and education. This almost violent “distortion” brought out an extraordinary sense of black humour. In a sense, the effort in erasing ethnicity, personality, geographic difference and classic symbols can also be viewed as a poignant metaphor of the disasters caused by globalization. During this exhibition, Yang Maoyuan will present his recent “Look Inside” Buddha series together with some paintings based on the primary colours of bright red, yellow and blue. Whether it is in a two or three dimensional space, the artist’s concept remains clear and stable. Formal elements such as colour, composition, volume and perspective are all united by a coherent idea of “reverse reconstruction”. What they form is an alternative landscape in the spiritual world.  

As the curator, I once lost my direction when I was trying to think of a title for the four-person exhibition. This spring, when I was in Beijing, the word “possibility” came to my mind one night and has stuck there ever since. It suddenly occurred to me that all four of them are extremely unique artists, and that although each of them has a different style, they share the same passion and desire that allow them to keep pursuing brand new possibilities.
As the title of the exhibition, “possibility” carries four layers of basic meanings:
Space and growth. As mentioned earlier, Chinese contemporary art has gained huge success both at home and abroad ever since the 1990s. More and more Chinese contemporary artists have stepped onto the international stage, playing important roles that attract the public’s attention. Stimulated by the prospering art market, Chinese contemporary art has become extremely popular around the world in recent years. In a more and more utilitarian environment, it is absolutely necessary to give special attention to new creative possibilities which genuinely reflect upon various cultures and which tackle the inherent problems of art.
Mix and crossover. As representatives of the contemporary art world, Lu Hao, Wang Yin, Xiao Yu and Yang Maoyuan have overcome the limitations of artistic media during their many years of creative practice. Through painting, installation, sculpture, mixed media and other creative methods, they have detected and touched upon sensitive issues in Chinese contemporary art, inspiring people to think about the “possibilities” of artistic expressions, teasing out controversial topics that later resonate in the art world.
Challenge and subversion. Although all coming from academic backgrounds, the four artists chosen this time have never allowed their creative practice to be limited by the education of fine arts colleges. They often pose questions in forms of progressive experiments, encouraging us to contemplate themes such as history, reality, classics and taboos, challenging various possibilities of visual art.
Concept and the future. Although expressed in diverse styles, the four artists’ works are all full of creative wisdom. By displaying these artworks, we hope to present to the audience a fundamental aspect of Chinese conceptual art. We would also like to take the opportunity to discuss its values and meanings in the context of the contemporary art development since the 1990s, and to predict the future possibilities of this genre.
 
Although the show is not big in scale, I hope that it turns out to be a unique and successful collection that brings to various viewers fresh experiences as well as relevant thoughts. We would like to dedicate this exhibition to art itself and all exciting “possibilities” in life.

Li Xu
Shanghai, May 23rd, 2007

Note：
Frankenstein
Written in 1818 by Mary Shelley, the wife of the British poet P. B. Shelley, Frankenstein is often considered to be the first real science fiction in the world. The title “Frankenstein” is the name of a crazy scientist in the novel, who created a monstrous “human being” by connecting corpse pieces. This “human being” was later electro-shocked into life.

Rorschach ink-blot
Rorschach ink-blot test was originally created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921. It is a highly representative projection test and is widely used in today’s world. By examining the patients’ reactions to a series of standardized ink-blot patterns, the testers can find out about their personality traits projected in their responses. When designing the test, one puts some ink in the middle of a piece of paper, folds it and presses hard, forcing the ink to flow in all directions until it forms an irregular but symmetric pattern..

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Bertolt Brecht is a German playwright, a theorist of theatre, a director and a poet. His most representative works include The Threepenny Opera, The Good Person of Sichuan, Life of Galileo, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Days of the Communne, and many more. The Brecht system, the Stanislavsky system and the Mei Lanfang system are often referred to as the “Three Major Drama Systems” of the world. Brecht is the creator of “Verfremdungseffekt”, a new aesthetic concept also translated as the “alienation effect”. The basic idea of this concept is to make the common unusual by using artistic devices. It reveals cause and effect relations, exposes contradictions and makes people realize the possibility of changing reality. From the performing perspective, “Verfremdungseffekt” requires a certain distance between the actor and his role. It is crucial not to mix the two as the actor must control his role from high up, and performs without submerging himself in it.