On June 18th 2011 Yang Gallery Beijing will have its grand opening, hosting an exhibition curated by Yang Wei and featuring 10 of the most established Chinese Contemporary Artists - he calls it "Splendor".

A Gathering of Heroes:
A preface to 'Splendiferous', an exhibition featuring ten of the most established Chinese Contemporary Artists.

I have selected 'Splendiferous' as the title of this exhibition; the word shows the interplay between its original meaning and as well as its figurative significance.

From the origin of the word we find it signifies 'containing or carrying dazzling brightness' and gradually it becomes to mean full of splendor, this is definitely not a word you may often encounter in everyday life, yet I find it most precisely describes the spirit of our exhibition.

We exhibit the works of ten artists; as ten in Chinese is a number standing for comprehensiveness we hope the audience will find this comprehensive character as our ten artists convey their splendor to you. The other significance of Splendiferous is the brilliance 'contained' in each artist; each of the ten artists show their unique styles through their art work, and just like the poem says 'one man, the world he lives in, one flower, the heaven it blossoms'.

Usually, exhibitions have a subject matter that helps to emphasize similarities among artists so that one can find the subject matter from works of those several similar artists; however this exhibition is quite the opposite, the subject matter is constituted by the differences among our ten artists, so that each individual artist shows his or her own style and creativity. This hodgepodge layout certainly bears on the open mind of the chief of Yang Gallery. As a passionate promoter of Chinese contemporary art, Susanna Yang endeavours at showing the multitude and the resourcefulness of the genre.

In fact, Chinese contemporary art has in recent years changed drastically, mainly, on slimming down of form of consciousness; Chinese contemporary art no longer flatters the West by expressing a different kind of form of consciousness, but is going back to its proper cultural context and becoming a kind of humanistic narrative of everyday life. The abundant possibilities of everyday life cultivate the richness of Chinese contemporary art and the latter displays the complex characteristics that are constantly changing under different perspectives of the audience.

This exhibition tries to show such diversity even though there are only ten artists partaking in the exhibition, they are all exemplars, and combined together they cover almost all of the thirty years of the history of Chinese contemporary art.

Yue Min Jun is an icon of Chinese contemporary art, the celebrated symbol smile that he created has long been held in esteem. This time Yue is not continuing his trademark smile but instead chose to adopt its burlesque approach to show a new ready-made instrument. He bought innumerable toilet scrubbing brushes and arranged them into a form, entitling this work "Making Acquaintance with Marcel Duchamp"; as well as deconstructing a legend in art history his piece also restores art to the everyday life of the people.

Wang Chuang is the good old Bolsheviks of Chinese contemporary art, he engaged in 'soiled in country painting' in his early days and became a pioneer of Chinese new art. After '85 new mode' Wang ceased painting the concrete and started to draw the abstract and was inspired by this experience of modernity. Wang shows his newest works in this exhibition and we can follow steps after the artist in it of his life-experience of transcending the realism.

Liu Hong was classmate of Wang Chuan in college as well as being a representative of Chinese female art, her early works tend to show the body in first person perspective and was strongly swayed by the will to affirm the self. Her newer works turn to the outside world but still take as the subject the fate of women, with profound cultural self-examination.

Pan De Hai, a key person in '85 new mode', had set his fame with his "Corns Pulled Apart" series. Later he extracted his visual language style from this series and applied it to the society, from concept to the concrete, developed a new vista of human beings.

Chen Wen Ling is one of the key people who brought Chinese artists from modern sculpture to contemporary sculpture. His works refer to all situations a man faces, and by employing exaggeration he brings back the ridiculous to the world we live in and force us to confront embarrassments and angst of our existences.

He Wen Jue is the representative of the 'born after the seventies' artists, he started out by drawing people swimming, expressing anxieties that people experience under contingencies of material conditions, and more recently he turned to discovery of remembrance, through depicting scenes relevant to old films, he not only leads his art language to the hidden history but also found witnesses of coming of age for the whole generation that he is a member.

Wu MingZhong is a serendipity that Chinese contemporary art world has just received recently. His singularity consists in his creating an art expressive method fabricated of glass, through this means he is able to project, in his glacial world, our world and remind us of the fragility of different situations.

Yu Fan is a Don Quixote among Chinese contemporary artists. Over the years he has concentrated on the mutations of the mode of things, and this is most eminent in his refashioning of ancient Chinese furniture, employing new fabrications. These not only stimulate traditional aesthetic values, but endow also to the modern, with a touch of the gentleness of the classical age.

Chen Zhuo and Huang Ke Yi are a team of artists. In the last several years they have cooperated to create several large scale concept photographs, the grandeur of their force and abundance of details within their images have both moved us to appreciate the team's ambition of creativity and bold cultural vision.

Feng Feng is a 'conservative' among Chinese artists, his works root deeply in the historical context of China, carrying itself with 'Chinese spirit'.

It can be seen that the elements featured in the works of the ten artists all stand for different areas of Chinese contemporary art. I entitle the exhibition 'Splendiferous' not only for the difference of their styles, but more importantly based on the fact that each is exemplary. It is not inappropriate, based on their being representatives of Chinese contemporary art, that I call their collective, Splendor.