(AAPNW) – Featuring works by international artists, Zheng Fanzhi, Wang Guangyi, Shen Jaiwei and Hung Liu, opening Saturday, October 16 at the Akron Art Museum, “Culture Revolution” allows viewers a glimpse into the rapidly changing terrain of contemporary Chinese culture. The lush, poetic paintings, on loan from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, remain on view through February 27, 2011.
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to present this selection of remarkable contemporary Chinese paintings from the AMAM,” said Curator of Exhibitions Ellen Rudolph. “Culture Revolution will offer our audiences the chance to learn about modern China through powerful images created by artists who have lived through the tumultuous changes of the last several decades.”
During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the only manner of artistic expression permitted was a form of official propaganda that glorified the Communist regime through heroic images of peasants and workers. Although China remains a Communist state, the culture has undergone a true revolution since their economy opened to the rest of the world in 1978.
The artists in this exhibition exploit the freedom they now have to draw from all eras of Chinese and Western art. They not only speak of their individual experiences navigating the social and political upheaval of the last three decades, but they also reflect the clash of outmoded Socialist ideas with the consumerism brought about by capitalist reforms.
Guangyi’s “Great Criticism” series blends the political propaganda with the language and styles of American Pop art and commercial advertising. The message of the Mao-era paintings is ironically replaced with the promise of happiness through capitalist consumption.
After immigrating to the United States in 1984, Liu took advantage of her newfound freedom to take on topics such as, political persecution and hunger, which her family experienced firsthand in her native China. She renders these subjects timeless by combining traditional Chinese symbols such as birds, butterflies and fish with images from old photographs and finally overlays her compositions with washes and drips that dissolve the picture.
For more information, call 330.376.9185 or see: www.AkronArtMuseum.org
In other forthcoming 2011 AAM’s venues, the popular exhibition “Pattern ID” will be travel and open February 11, 2001 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri new site.
“The Kemper is a wonderful institution with an excellent exhibition program, and we are thrilled that audiences in the Kansas City area will have the opportunity to enjoy Pattern ID,” said Ellen Rudolph, curator of exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum. “All of the artists and private collectors who contributed to the show have very generously extended their loan of the art to allow for this new venue.”
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection features modern and contemporary artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning and Red Grooms, as well as many others.
For more information on Pattern ID, see: www.AkronArtMuseum.org/pastexhibitions or on the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, see: www.kemperart.org.