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December Group Show
3 December - 20 December 2008

Chinese Contemporary Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition by Fu Lei, Luo Brothers, Shen Fan, Tu Hongtao, Wang Ke and Xue Song.

The three Luo Brothers, Luo Wei Dong, Luo Wei Bing and Luo Wei Guo, make works on paper, lacquer on wood panel, carved wood panels and statues out of lacquered resin. In all cases the works are riotous creations of kitsch. These works come from the side of the oriental nature that loves the bright lights and red lanterns that adorn every Chinese restaurant and city at festival time. These three artists have added the symbols of the new consumerism now omnipresent in their country as well as the symbols of the communist revolution into which they were born. Shen Fan is one of the leading abstract artists in China. He lives and works in Shanghai, the Chinese city that is home to the country's best abstract painters. While realism dominates the Chinese avant-garde, it is perhaps the cosmopolitan, fast moving pulse of Shanghai that encourages abstraction.

A graduate of the China Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou, Wang Ke is one of the most talented stars of the Cartoon Generation. Through her quest for individual identity, Wang Ke chooses to paint oversized, stylized heads, which she claims are anthropomorphic interpretations of her own facial features. Employing cartoon imagery as a vehicle for self-reflection, the artist volunteers the most physically unique element that she lays claim to, her body, for critique. Tu Hongtao was deeply inspired by the beautiful West Lake. He says being so close every day to this wonderful site impressed upon him the spiritual qualities of landscape. Similarly he speaks of the influence on his work of the great soul and power of Chinese ink painting. And the power of the sublime in nature is in clear opposition to the bizarre element introduced by human figures. Humanity appears low, like a pollutant, when next to the magnificence of nature.

One of the most important artists of the Chinese avant-garde, Xue Song has seen the entire social, economic and political transformation and continues to witness this amazing evolution. Recent works express the distance between the revolutionary China of his childhood, traditional Chinese culture and the ever-changing new China. Fu Lei lives and works in Beijing. His works are creations of pure fantasy, which are happy, a little surreal and indicative of the creative freedom in which he works. In earlier decades, his paintings would have been condemned as decadent and bourgeois.

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