The world is moving forward. The old is being bulldozed to be replaced by the new, the spiritual is being overtaken by the material, the world is realizing that fewer and fewer resources are to be shared between more and more humans, … The new century is looking ultramodern and almost forbidding. Artists are the shamans and the visionaries of any society, seeing with their eyes what is on the horizon and what coming. Chinese artists are no exception. Russia and China share a common history of proletarian dictatorship, altered by a subsequent opening to the global free market. Under Stalin and Mao, the two neighbouring states shared a difficult legacy of revolution, denunciation, censorship, famine, gulags, and now, liberalization. As the two countries come into their own, become emerging economies built on industry or natural resources, they are not looking back. They are ploughing forward with ambition and a new optimism which permeates everything, from art to lifestyle. Chinese and Russian artists are also freer to express themselves, only partly fettered, by the socialist Politburo. A new era is dawning, decades when Russia and China will perhaps increasingly dominate the world scene, be it culturally, politically or economically. The Tsum and its president, is pleased to bring one of the first Chinese contemporary art exhibitions in Russian history in the very centre of Moscow. Most of the artists in the exhibition such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Zhong Biao, Chen Wenling, Gao Brothers have already been included in international museum collections and exhibitions in New York, London, Paris or Beijing. This exciting exhibition brings the works of these artists for the first time to the Russian public, a public who is experiencing the same pressures and joys of modernization. Some younger artists, sharing the same concern of resolving the past and confronting the future, preserving tradition and welcoming a new happier, more prosperous era such as Tian Taiquan, Sofia Soh bring a new twist to a contemporary subject, sometimes with new technology, digitally manipulated photographs for instance. Pia Camilla Copper |
- Emile Morel
- Blue Noses
- Gao Zengli
- Xavier Zimbardo
- Nadine Blandiche
- Yun Aiyoung
- Philippe Perrin
- Feng Zheng Jie
- Tian Taiquan
- Kimiko Yoshida
