China’s most popular modern artists

Text by Ophelia Ren and Joana Melo

China’s art scene arrived with a bang ten years ago, and has been drawing the attention of curators, art houses, and viewers ever since. Not all of attention has been good, but time and time again the industry has emerged from its scandals as stronger, more resilient, and more expensive than before. At the forefront of this scene have been several artists whose names are better known through the news than their art at time, but this primer seeks to remedy that.

Cai Guoqiang 蔡国强 is one of the most influential contemporary artists in China. He burst onto the local scene with his fireworks display during the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2008, which won him a seemingly permanent place in the hearts and minds of his compatriots. His work, however, is far more dynamic and powerful than the fireworks display could ever convey, and Cai has won much respect, worldwide, over the years for his drawing, installation, video and performance art. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he began using gunpowder in his paintings, a look that later became his signature. Cai has won several important prizes over the past years, such as the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize (2007), AICA first place for Best Project in a Public Space for Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms (2010). He’s also made a pretty penny, selling 14 drawings for the Asia-Pacific Cooperation for USD 9.5 million in 2007.

Fang Lijun 方力钧 is a leading figure of the Cynical Realist movement that began in China in the early 1990s. His vivid works are marked by sentiments of rebellion and angst, and underscored with profound irony. His style combines social realism, mixed heavily with technical skills such as contemporary comics, folk art, and so on. His iconic figures have shaved heads that stand in contrast to alienated backgrounds, and are either shouting or wandering. His works usually are full of powerful contrast color and ugly faces, which represent the lost generation between traditional and modern society. Fang Lijun’s long time motif is the relationship between individual and masses and authority and rebellion in China in the latter part of the 20th century.

The Gao brothers 高氏兄弟 Zhen and Qiang, were born in 1956 and 1962 in Shandong province and now work in Beijing’s 798 art district. Their works are filled with political expression. The Gao brothers make use of a variety of mediums, like painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, to express their perspectives on Chinese society. In 2000, the Gao brothers organized the performance Hugging, in which couples of strangers embraced for 15 minutes and each group hugged for five minutes. Talks of taking this piece of performance art to NYC were cut short by the 9-11 terror attacks. The Gao Brothers employ strong political and religious elements in their various sculptures, such as 1968 and Mao, to symbolize a reflection on his rebellion against old norms.

Yue Minjun 岳敏君 is a wellknown contemporary artist who works in Beijing. The most famous images in his paintings and sculptures are laughers with their mouth wide-open, revealing more teeth than usual, naked bodies, and different kinds of uniforms. He uses his radical manner to depict his personal feelings towards the great social change in China. And he is also seen as one of the key member of the Cynical Realism movement of the early 1990s in China, although he refuses this label and has stated time and time again that he does not care what people think of him. One of his paintings, Execution, was sold for USD 5.9 million in 2007, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever to be sold from a Chinese contemporary artist.

Ai Weiwei 艾未未 is known, among other things, for his artistic explorations of several different art forms, including sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, and photography. In recent years, Ai has been very active in several fields of Chinese art. As an artistic consultant, he worked with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the Bird’s Nest Stadium, and in 2007, Ai designed a special exhibition named “Fairytale”, wherein he brought 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany, and made their experience the art. Last year, Tate Modern in London exhibited his new work Sunflower Seeds, which consists of 100,000,000 hand-made ceramic “seeds”. Ai invited people to walk and lie on the seeds to image the massive power of things that happen in China. Among contemporary artists, Ai may be the most decorated, and his accolades include being ranked 13th in the Art Review ’s guide to the 100 most powerful contemporary artists.

Liu Xiaodong 刘小东 is seen as one of China’s finest painters. He grew up in a small town in northeast China and got professional training in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Most of his paintings are of people’s daily life, and his characters are very realistic. It is said that his canvases represent the real China, and his most famous work are the series: “Three Gorges Dam”, the portraits of sex-workers in Bangkok, soldiers in Taiwan, and families in Cuba. His paintings always consist of vivid colors and strong expressions with perfect technique. Liu’s works also are the most expensive among Chinese contemporary artists.

Zhang Dali 张大力 was China’s first graffiti artist in the early 1990s, and the first Chinese artist given the cover of Time magazine. His work crosses mediums such as painting and sculpture, but one of his most famous works was when he portrayed over 2,000 images of his own head on buildings in Beijing in the 1990s. Recently his work Chinese Offspring brought him much attention, as he hung 15 life-size cast resin migrant workers upside down, implying that with China’s fast change, many are left feeling uprooted.

Zeng Fanzhi’s 曾梵志 paintings are very popular in China, and his diverse art has been in the mainstream for the past twenty years. In his early career, he did a series of hospitals and masked portraits of people, striking a deep chord with the inner fears of the public. In recent years, he has paid more attention to abstract paintings, especially in his series titled Grass. These abstract works are more spiritual and powerful, although much of his work still taps into the feelings of a society in flux.

Zhang Huan 张洹 is a performance artist whose work has a wide influence on Chinese contemporary art. He makes use of bodies, many of them naked, to orchestrate performance pieces that express various conditions, including suffering and trauma. Besides performance art, he also uses painting, photography and sculpture. One of his recent works, Donkey, placed sculpted donkey hinds in the wooden model of the tallest building in China to reflect upon rapid urban development in Shanghai. Many of his works also carry strong Buddhist themes, such as Long Ear Ash Head, in which he makes use of ash that he collected from temples to represent happiness as seen in Buddhism.

Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 is most famous for his Big Family series of paintings. Inspired by the photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution period, he painted the “Bloodline” series. These paintings usually focus on portraits, with dark and glazed eyes, bloodless skin and expressionless faces. Through these paintings, he engaged the collectivism of China in 1960s-1970s. All of his portraits appear the same and have little individuality, which reflect the artist’s investigation of the psychological and historical reality of China. Last year, his Forever Lasting Love broke the auction record of Chinese contemporary art with USD 10.1 million in Hong Kong.