Beyond Oriental Art

IMPRESSION: Zhang Hongtu's Shitao—van Gogh #7. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center

works by more than a dozen of China’s best-known contemporary artists are coming to the Cantor Arts Center for a three-month exhibition starting January 26. Guest curator Britta Erickson says she aims to dispel stereotypes, perpetrated by Western critics and curators, that marginalize China’s avant-garde. On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West runs through May 1.

The show’s East-meets-West motif finds expression in a variety of media—paintings, print, photography, performance (on video), installation, sculpture, interactive CD-ROM—used by artists whose approaches range from whimsical to anguished. Photographer Xing Danwen’s DisCONNEXION series, aesthetically pleasing at first glance, features close-ups of what the artist calls “e-trash”—obsolete cell phones, circuit boards, wires and cords exported from the United States to dumping grounds in China’s Guangdong province.

Among the more benign cultural fusions are Zhang Hongtu’s renditions of traditional Chinese paintings as they might be executed by Western impressionists and postimpressionists such as van Gogh (shown), Monet and Cezanne. And in MacArthur award-winner Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, a mixed media installation, visitors can try out the artist’s inventive method for converting English words into graphics resembling Chinese script.