Promising to become this summer’s sensation, the Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art in cooperation with the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn, is presenting CHINaRT, an exhibition selected by Walter Smerling, acting director of the Duisburg Küppersmühle and Fan Di’ An, vice-president of the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. As opposed to other Chinese artists frequently featured in international exhibitions, the artists included in CHINaRT studied in the People’s Republic of China and still live in China. Visitors to the Venice and the Sao Paulo Biennials may have already become familiar with their works, but contemporary visual art from China has never been shown in Hungary in such a comprehensive and prestigious selection.
The majority of the more than one hundred exhibited paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations have been created by a young generation of Chinese artists, in response to their currently perceived social, economic and political situation. At the same time, the selection provides opportunities for the viewer to compare their work with that of the older generation.
The exhibition partly comprises monumental artworks that do not only capture the attention of viewers through their dimensions but by their figurative renditions and strongly symbolic references. Some of the artists use traditional art forms and regenerate them with new contents.
Strongly manifest in the artworks are the efforts to translate Chinese topics into the visual vocabulary of Western culture. The achievements of Chinese civilisation and culture may only be vaguely comprehended in Europe. One of its segments, however, i.e., contemporary Chinese visual art as presented to the viewer by the CHINaRT exhibition, reveals a profound desire to preserve and maintain the artists’ independence of forms and their intellectual heritage despite strong Western influences.
