The contemporary art exhibition "Great Performances" opens on August 28th, 2010 at Pace Beijing. Funneling more than thirty of the most exciting artists of the moment through the perspective of "performance", this exhibition aims to shed light on the happenings and developments of contemporary art under China's specific and unusual conditions. Artwork to be displayed includes video, installation, painting and photography from 1990s until the present, all of which share one trait: a "consciousness of performance". A form that has much in common with the contemporaneous self-awakening of the Chinese people, this "consciousness" is the result of the artists' transformation of an eager desire to authenticate the self into a corporeal form of art that integrates performance, hyperbole and a heavy dose of the absurd. Within, there lies a vibrant, spontaneous and instinctual inner spirituality, the process of performing and expressing of which results in a ritualistic feeling that for all its solemnity is predictably ridiculous. Having evolved into a unchecked, dynamic and indeterminate spiritual form, this ritualistic feeling possesses a unique emotional appeal, one that arouses the urge to think in new ways.