Opening on October 18, 2007, Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, curated by Riccardo Rossi, is pleased to present selected works of Li TIANBING, Liu WEI, Ren HUI, Shi ZEPING, and Hang ZHAO.

Press Release: PDF: English

Pressemitteilung: PDF: Deutsch

Despite the variety of the styles encountered in this exhibition, the artists who have been chosen for it share concerns for the future of China, whose capitalist, post-Mao society has embraced a culture of materialism. They comment about the social changes without judging too harshly, but the very fact that they bring it up tells us that there is a real concern about what will happen next. While no one can predict the prospects as yet before us, it is clear from the works in the show that China, its past achievements and present potential, looms large in the imaginations of the painters at hand.


Commentary by Jonathan Goodman

This show includes the work of three Chinese painters from Songzhuang, who are currently known for their outstanding art and social commentary (Sonzhuang, an artists’ cultural center, lies on the outskirts of Beijing). Each of these artists have had experience showing their work in international forums; each of them add to a complex, compelling overview of what it is like for Chinese artists to make art in present-day circumstances. The sometimes jaded eye with which they view experience can be understood as a refusal to take sides and an accommodation to a certain kind of realism after the passing of democratic idealism. The tragic events of Tiananmen Square in May 1989 are kept alive within the imagination of these mid-career artists (most are in their forties), whose cynical realism—the actual title of a recent movement in art in China—enables them to consider change with an awareness of the events that inevitably led the student-run movement into a confrontation with the military of a single-party system. Behind the façade of judgment and even mockery, the artists seem discontented not only with the Mainland Chinese system, but with politics itself.

Despite the variety of the styles encountered in this exhibition, the artists who have been chosen for it share concerns for the future of China, whose capitalist, post-Mao society has embraced a culture of materialism. They comment about the social changes without judging too harshly, but the very fact that they bring it up tells us that there is a real concern about what will happen next. While no one can predict the prospects as yet before us, it is clear from the works in the show that China, its past achievements and present potential, looms large in the imaginations of the painters at hand.