Rossi & Rossi Ltd, one of London’s leading dealers in the arts of Asia, will continue their series of exhibitions of contemporary artists with two timely shows this Summer illustrating two men’s visions of their country. The first exhibition is devoted to the work of the Tibetan painter Tsering Nyandak followed by the first London exhibition of works by the Chinese photographer Zhou Jun. The Tsering Nyandak exhibition, The Lightness of Being will take place in Rossi & Rossi’s gallery from 3 July to 1 August and Zhou Jun – Bird’s Nest Project, staged in association with the Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, will be on view from 7 to 29 August 2008. The second show coincides with the staging of the 2008 Olympic Games and focuses on China’s preparation for this world event.The recent events in Tibet have inevitably influenced a number of the paintings that will be exhibited in London. In an interview conducted by Kabir Mansingh Heimshath, a DPhil candidate in Anthropology at Oxford, that will be published in the exhibition catalogue, Nyandak described how he witnessed the riots and painted Middle Path immediately afterwards. “I first heard the shouting … Then I saw the beating, burning … and I began to feel quite uneasy – especially when I saw civilians were being beaten … So I thought about doing this kid in the middle of all the smoke and tanks. The child, I feel, is like Innocence – a bit like civilians and ordinary people caught in the middle of these problems.”Two works on show, Concrete and Buddha Head address the situation in Amdo when an area was developed and nomads were moved into concrete houses. Nyandak explains “In doing that a lot of the traditional ways of living changed. They could not do their normal pilgrimage, they couldn’t graze their animals on the grasslands … development brings on the disappearance of a lot of traditional elements. So all those things I wanted to show in this painting. And this one Buddha Head moving the Buddha head somewhere could be like a continuation of the previous one … One thing is removed for another to be put in place. The head is carried away by the crane.”Heimshath observes “In the late 1990s there were few artists in Lhasa that strayed from the romantic portrayal of standard ‘Tibetan’ subject matter, such as cute nomad girls, old monks, desolate landscapes and Buddhist ruins. Nyandak’s work, on the other hand, includes urban landscapes and contemporary life expressed with distorted irony and shades of depression.”Tsering Nyandak was born in Lhasa in 1974 and he lives and works in that city today. From 1985 to 1993 he lived and studied in Dharamsala (India) and in 1993, after returning to Tibet, he studied art under Tsewang Tashi, a leading Tibetan artist and professor at Tibet University. He has participated in exhibitions in China, Germany and Nepal and is a founding member of the dynamic Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild.China’s rapidly increasing economic growth as well as the lead-up to the Olympics has led to an explosion of construction and development in cities and villages and this urbanisation is reflected in the work of many Chinese artists including the photographer Zhou Jun. Born in 1965 in Nanjing, Zhou Jun graduated from the Department of Photography at the Art School of Nanjing Normal University. Three solo exhibitions have been held of his photographs in Beijing and Shanghai and he has participated in other group exhibitions in China, New York, Hong Kong and Melbourne. The Rossi & Rossi show, comprising some 15 works on sale in editions of ten, will be his first solo exhibition outside China.Zhou Jun’s work emerges from construction sites and testifies to his ambivalent feelings about the exciting expansion of Chinese cities that inevitably erodes and subverts traditional architecture. Using a Swiss Sinar camera, he has developed his own unique narrative language using black and white images on which certain areas, particularly the scaffolding, are highlighted in red. For example in the Hall of Supreme Harmony construction site in the middle of Beijing’s Forbidden City, the entire surrounding scaffolding is dyed red.An outstanding image of the architectural masterpiece that will undoubtedly be best remembered from the 2008 Olympics – the national sports stadium known as the Bird’s Nest – emphasises the delicacy of the enormous structure by highlighting in red the network of scaffolding and surrounding railings still in place in 2006.The colour red is of special significance in China. While it is often used on ceremonial occasions such as weddings and festivals, it also represents radical socialism, revolutionary communist ideology and governmental power as well as, to many people, political bloodshed and social turmoil. The red in Zhou Jun’s photographs therefore not only acts as a visual marker but also allows the viewer to give the images their own interpretation.Zhou Jun’s arresting and beautiful photographs will surely become important images documenting momentous changes not only in the appearance of Chinese cities but also in the culture of an ancient civilisation.