"Complex, contrary, creative: this exhibition showcases work by young photomedia artists from mainland China who reflect the ambivalence of their times. Born in the seventies they are the first 'me' generation - consumerist, connected and self-aware. They are vain yet vulnerable; wired yet lonely. They ride the rollercoaster of 'progress' while wistfully dreaming of the past. Abandoning any notion of the photograph as a document of the real each work is a performance, a visual fable that finds its truth in imaginative resonance rather than hard evidence.
Playful yet earnest, while some artists wield satire like a sword others evoke a quiet melancholy for lost tradition. Others still, weighed down by the burden of duty to family, ancestors, community, state and the competitiveness born of consumerism, simply imagine what it would be like to fade into another world or fly away like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis."
Saturday 1 February to 8 March 2008
Tue - Fri: 12.00 - 7.00pm, Sat & Sun 10.00am - 6.00pm
Gallery 1, 2 & Foyer
Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford Street, Paddington NSW 2021
T: 02 9332 1455, F: 02 9331 6104
Curated by Alasdair Foster
IMAGE © Liu Lijie Another Episode 2006 Courtesy of Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York
W: http://exhibitions.acp.org.au/exhibitions/future.php
