Exhibition "What about China?" at Centre Pompidou, Paris.
This multidisciplinary event marks the Year of China (October 2003 to July 2004) and gives a first insight into the vitality and diversity of contemporary Chinese creation over the past five years.The exhibition playfully invites visitors to make their way around an open, partitionless area where they encounter handicraft items, paintings, sculptures and videoscreens placed in the squares of a vast game of Go. The works are set out around a vast model of Beijing created by Lu Hao.
China has always fascinated the French. They often have only a very limited vision of this country. How, in fact, can we provide an exhaustive account of the state of creation on this rapidly changing continent where 1 billion 200 million individuals are creating a “new China” whose dynamism and vitality astonish observers?
This event is not an exhaustive overview. Its ambition is to arouse the desire to discover contemporary China and to offer an overview of the richness of this creation across all areas:
- painting (Fang Lijun, Liu Xiaodong, Zhou Tiehai);
- photography (Mu Chen and Shao Yinong, Weng Fen, Xing Danwen, Bai Yiluo);
- sculpture (Shi Hui, Song Dong);
- facilities (Hong Lei, Yang Maoyuan);
- videos (Yang Fudong, Kan Xuan, Li Yongbin, Wang Jianwei);
- cinema (Jia Zhangke, Ning Ying, Ju Anqi);
- musical works (Guo Wenjing, Cui Jian, Liu Yuan, Yang Qing);
- architecture (Ma Qingyun, Wang Shu, Chang Yung Ho, Liu Jiakun);
- some ancient art objects and handicrafts.