It is a challenging exercise today, to think of painting from the Chinese world as a collective body, to track its shifting contours and influences. Just ten years ago, the mention of contemporary Chinese art would immediately evoke images with identifiable markers, like the blown-up heads from the 1990s by Cynical Realists Fang Lijun or Yue Minjun.
Although there have been a great many painters since the 1980s, working in diverse styles and languages, up until the early 2010s many of them shared a common investment in the traditions and history of Chinese painting - whether the heritage of socialist realism or the use of ink - and in the depiction and invention of culturally specific signs. But now, that seems to be yesterday's story when we look to a younger generation of painters. The five profiled here were all born after the mid-1980s in Mainland China and Taiwan, trained both domestically and abroad, and are currently based around the world, from Shanghai to Los Angeles to Paris.
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Xinyue Yan studied in Guangzhou, China, London, and Antwerp, Belgium, before moving to Shanghai in 2019, and then onto her current base of LA in 2022. This markedly metropolitan trajectory has doubtlessly influenced the development of her work, which zeroes in on our hedonistic cravings - for love, wine, and all the things that are supposed to make up the so-called 'good life' - amidst the chaos and absurdity of urban living. In Glasses Crisis (2021) a waiter holds a precarious tray with one too many wine glasses, several of which are tumbling into a void, and in her latest series, inspired by downtown LA, a voyeuristic gaze alights upon people doping and dancing behind the windows of the area's famous art deco buildings. Yan's work weaves dread, irony, and hilarity through a magical realist world overflowing with technical improvisation, a willing embrace of the 'bad' and 'ugly,' and a fearlessness with regard to accidents and clashes.
