"Cruel/Loving Bodies: Artists Grapple with Chinese Identity"
2004-06-15 until 2004-06-25
Duolun Museum of Modern Art
Shanghai, , CN China

The "Cruel/Loving Bodies" exhibition brings together art works in diverse media--sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video--that reflect upon the interrelated issues of gender and body, particularly in the context of China and Chinese diaspora. The exhibit participants live in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Great Britain, and the United States. Working from locations and backgrounds that challenge a dichotomous East/West border, they grapple with the question of Chinese identity, but in local contexts with different social and historical conditions. From this rich layering of experience emerges a shared exploration of how personal histories or historical legacies are inscribed on the gendered body.

The collective work of these practitioners crossing borders represents social and historical cruelty inflicted upon the body--in the form of physical violence or social regimes of surveillance--but also counters cruelty with a simultaneous focus on the body as a sensual site of love and subversive possibility. They mix cruelty with cuteness, violence with humor, intrusion with intimacy, and repressed histories with metaphors of healing.

Artists included in the exhibition are:
Bai Chongmin & Wu Weihe (Beijing, PRC)
Neil Conroy & Lesley Sanderson (Sheffield, UK)
He Chengyao (Beijing/Chongqing, PRC)
Anthony Leung Po Shan (Hong Kong)
susan pui san lok (London, UK)
Mayling To (London, UK)

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for China

Other Important Exhibitions in China