On 28 September at 17.00, the China Now exhibition opens at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen. Exclusively for PICNIC delegates the Cobra Museum has reserved a limited number of tickets for this special occasion. Interested? Please send an email to Katja Weitering (k.weitering@cobra-museum.nl).
Contemporary Chinese art is a very recent phenomenon. In the 1990s during the fundamental political and social changes, Chinese avant-garde artists embarked on the slow journey, marked by numerous setbacks, from underground artists to international shooting stars.
The artists engage in a critical and sometimes humorous reflection on the changes occurring in Chinese society, on capitalism, globalisation, the dichotomy between the masses and the individual, but also on Western art. Traditional elements of Chinese arts influence their work just as much as the symbols of long-practiced Socialist Realism.
Feng Boyi, member of the “Chinese Artists’ Association“, has selected more than 100 works by 42 artists involving all contemporary arts media, including painting and photography as well as large-format installations and video. The exhibition traces the most important developments of Chinese avant-garde art in seven thematically arranged galleries.
Most of the works are owned by The Essl Collection. In the late 1990s, Karlheinz Essl started to explore Chinese art, and the works he acquired in recent years during his visits to artists’ studios in Shanghai and Beijing form the backbone of the exhibition, supplemented by significant art loans from China and Europe.
CHI PENG, Sprinting Forward 2 (2004)
