PEM exhibit highlights contemporary Chinese art

SALEM – The growth of China’s art world is keeping pace with the country’s meteoric economy and those seeking a sample of contemporary paintings, drawings, photographs and video work can find it at the Peabody Essex Museum.A new exhibit, Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art, presents over 100 works from the famed Uli Sigg Collection – described by art experts as among the world’s significant and comprehensive collections. The show charts China’s artistic transformation over the last 40 years and offers a unique vantage on its rapidly evolving art market.PEM is the only East Coast venue for Mahjong, which includes works by groundbreaking artists such as Liu Wei, Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun, and Zhang Huan. The show runs through May 17.According to Trevor Smith, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, the last 40 years of unprecedented social, political and economic transformation forged a generation of Chinese artists unlike any who came before. From times of restriction and relative obscurity, through more recent years of increased artistic freedom and record-breaking international auctions, Chinese artists observed the changes around them and navigated their own internal landscapes, he said, noting that China is now home to one of the most dynamic and innovative contemporary art scenes in the world.”The Sigg Collection is enormously important because it is the first attempt to coalesce the extraordinary artistic developments that have taken place in China over the last forty years. While the collection includes significant and early examples of many artists’ works, it also promotes understanding of the complexity of Chinese culture and the country’s emergence as a global powerhouse,” Smith said.Sigg, a Swiss businessman and former vice president of the first joint venture between China and the West in 1979, was slated to attend today’s opening, is. He was the Swiss Ambassador to China, Mongolia and North Korea from 1995 to 1998. As such, he has observed firsthand the evolution of Chinese contemporary art as an artistic idiom in its own right, and made his first purchases in the 1990s.Since then, Mr. Sigg has acquired more than 2,500 works by over 200 contemporary artists from China. His wish is to ultimately return the works to China for permanent installation in an as-yet-to-be determined, Smith said.For years, Chinese artists were obligated to work within state requirements, isolated from many artistic developments around the world. The current dynamism of Chinese contemporary art was inspired not only by the magnitude of change in recent decades, but also by a rich artistic tradition thousands of years old, according to the curator.In contrast with the strong abstract tendencies often seen in modern Western art, a great deal of China’s contemporary art has been figurative in character – the visual legacy of Soviet era Social Realism. Cinema, photography, pop art and advertising have fused with this style resulting in the work of artists such as Liu Xiaodong’s painting of party cadres on holiday, and Hai Bo’s restaging of a photograph taken during the era of the Cultural Revolution. The rise of a burgeoning consumer economy, the immensity of sprawling cities and the new propaganda of brand culture have also provided ample inspiration for many Chinese artists.The PEM is open Tuesday-Sunday and holiday Mondays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $15 for adults, $13 for seniors, and $11 for students. Additional admission to Yin Yu Tang, a Chinese house dismantled and then reassembled inside the museum, is $5. No admission is charged to PEM members, youth 16 and under and residents of Salem.