- Press Release -

Trans-Formation
September 1 – September 28, 20009
Opening reception: September 3rd 2009, 6 – 8 PM





Art Next Gallery is proud to announce “Trans-Formation”, an exhibition of recent work by five artists who share deep interest in surrealistic imageries inspired by dreams, folk and foreign mythologies, hallucinatory reality, and imaginary world of thrilling and sometimes humorous creatures and species. Executed in traditional mediums and techniques of oil painting, egg tempera, paper-cut and photography, the artworks represent the artists’ reactions to the fast changing reality that is filled with increasing uncertainty and delusion along with modern wonders.

Li Shan, who currently lives and works in Shanghai and New York, is a veteran of the Avant-garde Art movement in China since the late 1980s and a renowned artist of the Political Pop group. In recent years Li has moved away from his well known Rouge series that represent China’s former leader Mao Zedong in a Pop Art style. From 2002, Li started his Reading series in which he experiments with images of imaginary creatures that are inspired by his interest in biological science and genetics, especially inter-species breeding. Also an active member of the Avant-garde Art movement in China, Sun Liang, who now lives and works in
Shanghai but who travels widely, has created images that are results of fusion and conflict of Chinese and Western
mythologies. While Li and Sun are established artists in China,
Xiaoqing Ding, Yoyo Xiao and Xin Song are younger generation of artists who received education both in China and the United States and who started their promising artistic career in New York City. Ding
uses traditional mediums and techniques of egg tempera, pastel and silverpoint in creating her imagery of hallucinatory reality that is fused with folk mythology that she’s been familiar with since her childhood in China. Xiao’s photography works are of distorted and modified images that he composed using digital technology. Based on still photographs of characters and scenes taken in reality, these photographic works are meant to examine the emotional reactions of viewers toward illusion. Song’s large scale paper works are made of layers of collaged magazine pages and newspapers. Executed in the folk art technique of paper-cutting, they are visual demonstrations of the fusion of traditional Chinese and modern Western aesthetics.

“Trans-Formation” is organized by Zhijian Qian, an art historian, critic and curator who teaches modern and contemporary Chinese and East Asian art at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.






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