The Wave

What we call today Chinese contemporary art sprouted and began to flourish simultaneously with the economic boom of the People’s Republic of China. The entire world, including the US, Japan, Australia and the whole of Europe, stood wide-eyed, astonished, trying to grasp the unbelievably fast booming of the Far-Eastern country. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou produced so many artists and created so many artworks in just one decade, that the Western discourse on art history suddenly required serious amendment.

Several European and American big cities keep hosting giant exhibitions that call attention to Chinese artist-factories. The largest representatives of the international contemporary art market are competing to colonise the new-found land.

Why is everyone focusing on China? Can we find new, undiscovered paths for fine art in a country where works of art are engendered independently of Western philosophy and art history, employing completely different semiotic systems?

Li Zhenhua, Chinese curator of The Wave project, attempts to find answers to such questions with his selection of videos. The selection, showing 20 experimental films, approaches the past ten years of Chinese video art from an almost historical perspective, spanning from the birth of Chinese video art until the present day. The reason it is sensible to call such a short period history is that this single decade in China brought 20-40 years’ worth of change at a European scale, in terms of style, mentality and technique.

The Wave is meant to show the diversified and extreme nature of this process. The selected short films were made by prominent Chinese artists:

1201 (Wang Ning, 2002); BACKYARD-HEY! SUN IS RISING (Yang Fudong, 2001); BEAUTIFUL CLOUD (Zhou Xiaohu, 2001); DANAM (Zhang Dan and Chen Man, 2003); JERK DON’T SAY FUCK (Zhao Liang, 2000); ME (Wu Quan, 2002); MO XI TOWN (Shi Qing, 2003); NEWS DANCE (8GG, 2002); PING PONG (Qiu Zhijie, 1997); SUMMER OF 1969 (Cao Kai, 2002); SING WITH ME (Zheng Yunhan, 2004), and others.

The idea of presenting the show in Budapest is a result of Katarina Sevic and Gergely László’s study trip, throughout which they had an opportunity to make contact with several prominent figures of the Beijing art scene.