Young Artists Projects at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art will make its debut with Symptoms, the first exhibition at the center in 2012. A long-term project of the center to be held once or twice a year in different ways, Becoming Peninsula is aimed to follow, study and hold discussions about young artists, including their art practice and achievements.  

Symptoms will have its opening at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art on March 3, 2012. The catalogue for this exhibition will include curatorial articles about each artist and interviews.  

This exhibition features eight artists born around the 1980s: Lu Yang, Yan Heng, Cheng Ran, Ren Hang, Li Wei, Yan Xing, Yuan Yuan and Zang Kunkun.

These artists are different from their previous generation who were mostly idealists in their youth which were obsessed by vision of changing destiny and building bright future. After the social transformations in the 1990s, the aura of idealism disappeared. Business culture took root in China. This period coincided with the initial stage of apprenticeship of the young artists featured in this exhibition. The highly specialized division of labor and the elaborate social structure can allow everyone a tiny position only. No doubt young people can only expand their space inwardly, therefore greatly expanding their world as individuals. In the meanwhile, the highly developed media and technology give these young people easy access to knowledge and information, greatly diversifying their own knowledge structure, so their complexity and diversity began to be highlighted. Growing up in this background, these young artists are diversified in terms of interest.

Then, will such inward reflection lead to isolation from society as far as their art is concerned? It is just the opposite. These original works not only depict the symptoms found in individuals but also those in society. They are mumbling monologue, mixture of the dream land, sociological reflections, narration of individual experience, or unique tastes. In the spontaneous aphasia, silence and blank, it is easy to find the symptoms in an individual or society. On one hand, we understand, to some extent, the meaning revealed in this works, and we have to find the answers to the problems these artists unconsciously hide in their works. These works are symptoms that help us to read our age, society, art, as well as these artists’ concerns.