Works by Contemporary Chinese Artists from the Shanghai Art Fair

The exhibition, shown at the St. Michael's Castle earlier this summer, moves to the Stroganov Palace where it will be on display from 22 August on.

The contemporary art scene in China has formed relatively recently. It was only 30 years ago that Chinese artists first entered the global art world, successfully shaping the art market ever since. The world has got to know Shanghai and Beijing biennales; works by Chinese artists are more and more often seen in the prominent museum and private collections; major auction houses actively operate on China’s art market.

The exhibition “The 2018 Art Tour of the SCO Kunming Marathon. Works by Contemporary Chinese Artists from the Shanghai Art Fair” presents a cross-section of today’s art scene in China. Works selected at the Shanghai Art Fair are intended to represent the diversity of styles and perspectives in Chinese contemporary art. It is for this reason that the organizers decided to engage famous artists (Cai Guangbing, Shen Jingdong) along with those who are yet less known in the world.

What is special about Chinese art is that many artists tend to use traditional, sometimes even archaic techniques and media, although concept-wise, they quite fit into contemporary art framework. For instance, Chinese ink painting, rice paper-based works, or works incorporating traditions of calligraphy (Wei Qingji, Cai Guangbing, He Zhenghua, Martin Ding). The boundary between tradition and modernity is blurred here. Some artists, on the contrary, tend to adopt Western style: that of Impressionist painting (Huang Laiduo) or Abstractionism (Ding She, Ge Ziyu, Ying Jingjing).

The exhibition of contemporary Chinese art allows seeing points of convergence and common trends in the culture of Russia and China, at the same time providing insight into the peculiar national character and originality of today’s Chinese art.