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Since the making of China¡¯s first video artwork, 30x30 by Zhang Peili, in 1988 ¡ª an allegory critical of governmental ideologies of continuity and progress ¡ª the neighbouring east-coast metropolises of Shanghai and Hangzhou have become major centres for the development of video art in China. Both cities have historically cosmopolitan cultures within which thriving contemporary art communities make innovative use of electronic media. Shanghai was a major focus for the development of western(ized) modernity in China during the early-twentieth century and has, since the 1990s, become a leading site for the production, display and selling of contemporary art. Hangzhou is strongly associated with traditional Chinese literati culture and is home to the China Academy of Fine Art (formerly the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art) ¡ª a focus for progressive art education in China since 1928. Some of China¡¯s most notable video artists were trained and have established careers in and between Shanghai and Hangzhou, including the founder of the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, Zhang Peili, and the internationally renowned film and video maker, Yang Fudong.

This exhibition showcases a diverse range of video works by the latest generation of artists with a working relationship to Shanghai and Hangzhou. All of the works involve encounters between internationally established approaches to art-making and local forms of cultural thinking and practice.?Some evoke atmospheres of anxiety and unease; others, beauty and meditative stillness ¡ª contrasting aesthetics brought about by the sometimes violent collision between modernity and a renewed sense of cultural tradition within an increasingly self-confident 21st-century China. Many also display a wry sense of humour, playfulness, and desire to provoke, characteristic of the generation of artists born in China after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

New China/New Art comprises works that no longer fixate on clich¨¦d aspects of China¡¯s revolutionary past. Instead, there is a close, often personalized attention to contemporary urban life combined with critically resistant assertions of identity, set against the shifting backdrop of an increasingly globalized world. The exhibition offers rare insights into a ¡®cool¡¯ urban cultural scene still largely unknown outside China.