What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China

What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China examines the issue of creativity—a topic rarely touched upon in the multitude of exhibitions on Chinese contemporary art. Curated by the internationally acclaimed New York based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the exhibition aims to illuminate a set of current practices by Chinese artists that attempt to challenge the Chinese traditional aesthetics and the Western art historical canon. By presenting each artist’s works in an independent gallery space, the exhibition highlights their individual pursuit of artistic expressions, concepts, methodologies and attitudes.  Their diverse bodies of work cross the media of painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance and interactive video game design.  This exhibition offers a unique perspective to the contemporary art world, shifting an emphasis from its idiomatic language of criticism, biography and context, to a focus on the artworks themselves.  Featuring works by:  Jenova Chen, Hu Xiangqian, Hu Zhijun, Hunag Yong Ping, Li Liao, Liang Shaoji, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Jennifer Wen Ma, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Wang Jianwei, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, and Zhou Chunya.

This exhibition was co-designed by Reem Al-Thani and myself. We each handled half of the 14 galleries dedicated to the artists. From creating a visitor experience around artistic video games , to having a 100 tons of water spraying violently in an enclosed steel cube, this was a blockbuster exhibition. I dealt extensively with the artists and the curator to design an immersive scenography that thrilled visitors. Like all other previous exhibitions I worked on, I handled the process from the planning/tendering phase all the way through to the fabrication/implementation.