Yang Shaobin e Zeng Hao

Contemporanea Arti e Culture
Through July 22

For the last Venice Biennale, Harald Szeemann invited quite a few mainland Chinese artists, evidence of the growing vitality of new ideas in that country.

Riding the wave of that success, Contemporanea, a cultural center in Milan, has organized an exhibition called Un'altra Cina (Another China), which presents the work of some of China’s emerging artists. The second exhibition, Lo spazio e la pelle (Space and Skin) is dedicated to the painting of Yang Shaobin (who was one of the artists who showed in Venice) and Zeng Hao.

The former, who is part of a movement we might call "cynical realism", offers up a series of large canvases, all in bright red tones, with huge heads or bodies painted with an expressive force so powerful that it deforms; yet he also uses a refined technique of laying on paint that makes it fade and dissolves before our eyes so that it renders the "skin" of the paintings vibrant and disturbingly life-like, just like that of the human body.

Zeng Hao’s work, on the other hand, takes a completely different direction. His compositions have a levity and an ironic and poetic vision of everyday life. His painting is definitely modern, but it also owes a lot to Chinese classical tradition in its absence of perspective and the respect for the proportions between the various elements. In fact, just as in ancient Chinese painting, the figures float in the background, with no strict relationships among them.

The difference lies in the fact that Zeng Hao paints people, objects and glimpses of interiors and exteriors that are in every sense modern, as well as livening up the backgrounds with solid blocks of color such as blue, orange or green. In these backgrounds are backgrounds of real life: a man sitting in an armchair, a corner of a kitchen, wardrobes, and household appliances, but also entire buildings or cars, depicted with a precise, clear style that reminds the viewer of Pop Art, as well as elements that are deliberately naïf.

Also connected to the exhibition is the work of Zhao Bandi, who has plastered the city with posters that are a sort of photographic cartoon, showing the artist himself in different urban settings, talking to a panda (the symbol of both China and the World Wildlife Federation). This project treats themes of great social and environmental importance with a fresh, ironic attitude.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Jacqueline Smith