Identity·Concept

Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Bing, and Huang Yongping keep denying the past, the present, and even what they have just created.Their obsession with modernity leads to tireless overthrow and subversion, for they are no longer as engrossed in construction as they used to be. Such a tendency is obviously influenced by Dadaism.It is this avant——garde nature in their creations in the 1980s that brings about the“Endless Pevolution”effect and impact. At the end of the 1980s, most of these artists immigrated to the United States, where they encountered cultural settings and artistic contexts that are completely different from those in China.Consequently, many take the path of artistic resistance and otherness, emphasizing their own unique identity and identification in the era of globalization.

Xu Bing, born in 1955 in Chongqing, now lives and works in Beijing, China and New York, the United States.Xu finished his undergraduate study In the Department of Printmaking of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1981 and took up a teaching position at the same school. He obtained his master's degree from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. He was invited by the University of Wisconsin in 1990 and Immigrated to the United States as an honorary artist. In 1998, Xu Bing was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the highest honor in the American cultural circle.In 2007, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Printmaking from the American Printmaker Association. He returned to China in 2008 and became a professor, Ph.D. supervisor, and Vice President at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. His representative works include A Book from the Sky(tianshu), Square Word Calligraphy (xinyingwenfangkuaizishufa), and A Book from the Earth (dishu).

Wu Shanzhuan, born in 1960 in Zhoushan Zhejiang province, now lives and works in Hamburg, Germany, and Shanghai, China, Wu graduated From Zhejlang Academy of Art (now China Academy of Art) In 1986, and acquired another degree from the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 1995, He initiated the “Red Humor" in the mid 1980s, and taught in Iceland in 1990, when he established the "Red Humor International’In 1991, he began to cooperate with Inga Svala Thorsdottir and founded “Tho’s Daughter's Pulverization Service." Filled with serious thoughts, his works are largely linguistic and symbolic games with undertones.

Cu Wench, born in Shanghai in 1955, now flues and works In Shanghai and New York. Gu graduated from Shanghai Arts and Crafts College in 1973 and acquired his master's degree From China Academy of Art in 1981, where he stayed on to teach. He won the Canada Council's Visiting Foreign Artist's Award in 1987 and had his first overseas exhibition at York University, Canada. Later In the same year he moved to the United States. In the early 1980s,he experimented with traditional Chinese ink wash painting by dislocating and deconstructing Chinese calligraphic characters, He has been a leading figure In the '85 New Wave Movement and has brought impact to a generation of artists in later years.

Chen Zhen (1955-2000), born in 1955 In Shanghai, was one of the pioneering installation artists in China. He received degrees first from Shanghai Arts and Crafts College and then from Shanghai Theatre Academy. Chen went to study in France in 1986, then he began to use everyday objects to create installations He studied and taught at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts de Parts (the National School of Flne Arts in Paris) and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastioues (the Institute for Advanced Studies in Visual Art).He participated In more than one hundred solo exhibitions and international art fairs around the world from 1989 and on.and he has made unioue contribution to the promotion of contemporary Chinese art onto the world stage, Chen died of cancer in Paris in 2000.

Cai Guoqiang, born in Guanzhou, Fujian province in 1957, now lives and works In New York, the United States. Cai graduated from the Department of Stage Design of Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1985. He travelled to Japan In 1986 and lived there until 1995 before he moved to New York. He began to use gunpowder, one of China's four inventions, as the theme for his works in the mid 1980s, and he has become one of the most prominent Chinese artists in the world in recent years. Being the "Cai Guoqiang Whirlwind" in the Western media, he was Chief Designer of the Visual and Special Effects at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and won the United States National Medal of Arts in 2012.