Beijing Exhibitions>> 10th Anniversary Exhibition

Chinese Contemporary gallery is celebrating ten years of championing the Chinese avant garde with a special exhibition in their Beijing gallery at Factory 798. In 1996 Chinese Contemporary opened in London and was the first gallery in the West devoted solely to contemporary Chinese art from artists living and working in China. Most of the works have been specially made for this anniversary exhibition and never seen before.

Hong Hao, renowned for his "My Things" photos of collections of thousands of objects, has created a special work, "Chinese Contemporary 10 Years". This photograph is made of a multitude of objects from the life of the gallery over the past ten years: exhibition announcements, images of the artists at the openings of various public and private exhibitions, great press moments for the Chinese artists, passes to the art fairs that have helped to make their names etc. It is a portrait of the gallery but more importantly a portrait of ten years of contemporary Chinese art.

Shen Fan will show three works typical of his minimal style but instead of the usual oil on paper or linen the "lines" of his creations will be small neon tubes. The tubes will light in a sequence to create the work of art and then go out to deconstruct the creation. The works will be red like the gallery's logo of three red squares. Selected for this year's Shanghai Biennale Shen Fan has made a colossal neon installation for the Biennale exhibition.

Xue Song has created some of his famous collage works using Chinese Contemporary catalogues as his source of paper. The head of Mao finds itself either filled with or surrounded by images of contemporary Chinese art.

Zhao Bo has painted one hundred small canvasses each 25 x 25 cm. These works are a wonderful presentation of Chinese life in it's obvious and less obvious forms. Each painting is a byte from the megachip that is China. They evoke the recent past and the far past, the ordinary and the wild, the super trendy and the bewildered, the nouveau and the not so. This is what Zhao Bo does best - capturing the richness of life.

There will also be Shi Guorui's latest camera obscura photographs - The Himalayas and Hong Kong. The Luo Brothers will exhibit wonderfully kitsch carved panels and sculptures - a plethora of revolutionary dancers, Coke bottles and cavorting pigs. Finally, Wang Guangyi has subjected Chinese Contemporary to his Great Criticism.