Huang Xian

After nearly three decades of development, the Chinese contemporary art scene has reached a new stage. Recent Chinese art is winning international recognition and the number of gifted, mature and globally conscious emerging artists has grown to a steady stream. These younger artists have grown up in the midst of remarkable social transitions and urban environment remaking; they have also achieved work in a country which is at the center of the global gaze, because of the rapid and extensive economic development of the country. China’s attitude towards its past—historical, spiritual, and material—is also under construction, and the tension between past and present suffuses the work of the artists.

Like many of China’s younger artists, Huang Xian is picking through the debris of his country recent and distant past, and considering the possibility of building a new cultural identity on these ruins.

“…City, I prefer to compare it to a birdcage, as Mr. Wang Shuo have mentioned in his novel.
Birds outside the cage want to come in, but the inside ones want to escape from it.
As for me, I have always been like the outside ones since my childhood. After all, as I had dreamt about, I flew into the cage. But there is a thought which has always stayed in my mind since then: I am always floating over the city, and perhaps with that overlook we can see much more clearly what has happened in this city …” Huang Xian