Shi Yong, Shanghai Sky, 2003

Shi Yong’s light box installation Shanghai Sky from the Haudenschild Collection was loaned to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo for the exhibition Follow Me! Contemporary Chinese Art at the Threshold of the Millennium on view July 2 – September 4, 2005. Curator Mami Kataoka invited artists Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Wenbo, Liu Zheng, Lu Hao, Ou Ning, Shao Yinong / Mu Chen, Shi Yong, Wang Qingsong, Weng Fen, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, The Yangjiang Group (Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin), Yin Xiuzhen and Zhou Tiehai.

Click here for more information about the exhibition.

“Follow Me! Chinese Contemporary Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium introduces over forty works by nineteen artists of this new generation. The title of the exhibition is taken from Wang Qingsong’s photo-tableau “Follow Me,” included in the show, which shows the artist as a teacher seated in front of a blackboard covered in Chinese and English writing on which the logos of famous American and European brands can be seen – a sideways comments perhaps on China’s recent wave of privatizations and opening up to foreign markets. But the words at the center of the board – “Let China walks towards the world! Let the world learns about China!” – suggest that they should not slavishly follow the developed world. In fact, the artist seems to be asking who, in the future, will be doing the leading. In confronting the many faces of the new China there can no longer be any single point of view or message in the art. One thing is sure though, the influence of this country’s artists is certain to grow in the future.

Contemporary China is characterized by an incredible dynamism. Things seem to be transformed everyday, fuelled by astonishing economic growth, frantic urban development and the preparations for the 2008 Olympics. Of course these changes are reflected in art. Throughout the 1990s Chinese artists slowly emerged into the international art world and were invited to take part in numerous exhibitions across the world. Now, at the threshold of the new millennium, interest in Chinese contemporary art is peaking again, as a new generation of artists – born in the late 1960s and 1970s – appears on the scene.

This new generation presents us with an accurate and complex picture of a culture in transition. They take as their subject matter the country’s disappearing traditional landscape, its new urbanism and rapidly changing social values. They are also concerned with the ways in which Chinese people are adapting their lifestyles to contemporary realities, freeing themselves from traditional stereotypes while actively utilizing new technologies.” – Mami Kataoka

About Mami Kataoka

Mami Kataoka is currently the senior curator at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and is the international curator at Hayward Gallery, London, where earlier in 2009 she presented the exhibition Laughing in a Foreign Language, exploring the role of humor in contemporary art practice worldwide. She has co-curated the exhibitions Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo (2006) in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; New Territories (2005) at ARCO Madrid. From 1997-2002 she was chief curator at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. In 2001 she co-curated “My Home is Yours / Your Home is Mine” with Hou Hanru and Jerome Sans. In 2002 she worked with the Barbican Art Gallery in London to produce “JAM: Tokyo-London” which included the work of over forty artists, fashion and graphic designers, photographers, musicians, and performers. In the same year Kataoka was one of nine curators to develop the exhibition “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art“. She was also the selector, with Hou Hanru, of the Asian galleries that participated in the 2004 ARCO held in Madrid. More recently she has worked on projects with artists: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Santiago Cucullu, Ozawa Tsuyoshi and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.