Chen Wei, Cui Jie, Guo Hongwei, Liu Chuang and more artists will be participating in a group exhibition at Tampa Museum of Art.

The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to announce that it is organizing an exhibition titled My Generation: Young Chinese Artists. The exhibition will be on view at the Tampa Museum of Art and our sister institution the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. The show is curated by Ms. Barbara Pollack and will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue to be published by D. Giles Ltd in London with essays by Ms. Pollack and Mr. Li Zhenhua.

My Generation: Young Chinese Artists is an extended look at the new generation of artists continuing to emerge in mainland China since 2000, the year that China first opened its doors to international artists and that Chinese artists began to command attention in the global arena. All of the artists in this exhibition were born after 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Almost all of them are products of the One-Child Policy and have grown up in a country with a high-powered market economy. All of them, whether educated in the West or not, have been exposed to global art movements through the Internet and increasingly liberalized education at China’s art academies. They are ambitious, determined, and technically sophisticated with much to say about their homeland—positive and negative—and are able to navigate around the restrictions of censorship and cultural differences. Their art works can be characterized as post-Chinese, free of stereotypes and icons, and liberated from an East-West dichotomy.

Nevertheless, their artworks speak volumes about China, a society that has undergone rapid industrialization and globalization in the past two decades. As such, this exhibition is a window on to this new China with new technologies, exhibition strategies, and reinvention of traditional practices and reflects the impact that rapid development has had on these artists’ lives. In this exhibition, there are painters, video artists, installation artists, photographers, and artist collectives, addressing issues of alienation, self-definition, cynicism, and rebellion as they examine their lives and their homeland from a global perspective. Some ruminate over how their roles in a society have changed so much since their birth, but have not yet changed sufficiently to give the artists total freedom. Others proceed exuberantly, without fear of reprisals or criticism.

*image (left)
© Cui Jie 
courtesy of the artist and Leo Xu Projects