Chinese palette

Europeans have developed a taste for the diverse array of works by China's artists on show at the Venice Biennale. Mariella Radaelli reports.

Contemporary Chinese art has a strong presence at this year's Venice Biennale, evidence of a growing appetite for it across Europe.

Stimulating exhibitions displaying the works of both new and established artists that are surprising, entertaining and moving represent a diverse national artistic landscape that is winning growing global respect.

Old nation's new Transfiguration

An exhibition titled Culture-Mind-Becoming, which opened at the biennale on June 1, aims to embrace the complexity of thought and themes characteristic of contemporary Chinese art, with its free and unexpected aesthetics.

Presented by the Global Art Center Foundation at Palazzo Mora and Palazzo Marcello, it illustrates and interprets the major expressions of an extremely heterogeneous art scene.

The exhibiting artists include renowned names familiar to the US and European art circuits, such as Xu Bing and Cai Guoqiang, while the solo show A Cautionary Vision is devoted to Fang Lijun, a prominent representative of post '89 China New Art and an exponent of the so-called cynical realism movement.

Fang's art is an emblematic and remarkable example of how a modern-day A-list Chinese artist pushes deeply into pure painting, avoiding the influences of the signal movements of modern art.

Fang took a formative trip to Germany. But his approach is immediate, not mediated by the European avant-garde, from Futurism to Surrealism, which changed the course of painting so dramatically.

Fang's 15 large paintings are on display at Palazzo Marcello. Each is 7 to 8 meters wide and depicts magnificent scenery, figures of people either floating in clouds or dwelling in the sea, and newborn babies riding storks or enclosed in claustrophobic bubbles. All the well-balanced compositions are characterized by a playful, ironic painterly touch and a vivid sense of fragments.