
Liu Chuang, Love Story (1), 2006-14. Found books, artist-colored rocks, wooden platform, and handwritten text on wall.
Ezra and Cecile Zikha Gallery
Wesleyan University
09 December, 2015 through 28 Feburary, 2016
Liu Chuang is featured in We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art—an exhibition hosted by Ezra and Cecile Zikha Gallery at Wesleyan University. The exhibition takes its name from WeChat, a Chinese messaging app with over 600 million users worldwide.
The exhibition features a total of ten young artists in China. Each of them were born in China after 1976, growing up with both the “One Child Policy” and the “Open Door Policy,” experiencing far greater opportunities and access to information about contemporary art movements than their predecessors. Their artworks reflect a major shift in Chinese contemporary art away from identifiable icons and stereotypes of Chinese culture to more experimental approaches to the issue of Chinese identity.
With most of the artists living in China and a few living in the United States, WeChat is one of the few commonalities shared by all the artists in this exhibition. By establishing a dialogue between these artists, the exhibition “We Chat” offers a new vision of Chinese identity, one that is more fluid, subtle, and more open to global influences. The artists work in every medium—painting, photography, installation and video, even a fully operational video game built around a character called Uterusman. Together, these artists represent a generation on the rise whose artworks will certainly command international attention in the near future.
This exhibition debuts at Wesleyan, and features works by Liu Chuang, Sun Xun, Jin Shan, Ma Qiusha, Lu Yang, Bo Wang, Pixy Liao, Shi Zhiying, Guo Xi, and Yan Xing. The exhibition is curated by Guest Curator Barbara Pollack.