Date: Jun 26- Aug 22, 2010

Venue: 798 Center For Art Promotion, Beijing

VIP Pre-Exhibition: Fri,June 25,2010,17:00-20:00

When an art center is institutionalized and loses its vitality, people always can find a new place to get together. This convergence of different regions is also the collision of different cultural conceptions and personalities.

Crowds of art from the world like art professionals and art lovers from other occupational areas are constantly gathering in Beijing 798 Art Zone. We have no idea that if 798 Art Zone can become the art center in the future, but people start to expect it to be such a role at least. This is proved through 798 its position as an international art zone that formed along with the flourishing of the Chinese art market in the past five years.

China has just finished the art recovery in the past thirty years. The Chinese art turned up on the stage of the world exhibition in 1990s, has completed the process of marketization in the last ten years, and establishes a relative independent art system that based on the capital and the society. During this process, China has tried to create the Chinese new art through learning from the western modern art.

The issue of the modern creation of art is a constant topic for discussion in China. Actually, it is impossible to be complete westernization or fully returning to Chinese traditional track again. The globalization of industry, pop culture, communication, finance, environmental protection, education and travel, and the modern conception and thinking of democracy, science, cultural diversity and civil society gradually form a human consensus. And so does art. It always needs to constantly keep contact with the own tradition of every artist and critic, including thinking with its own language, learning the useful factors of traditional art and philosophy, summarizing and expressing the profound transition experience of this age, and using new media tools.

This exhibition is composed of paintings with unique art style of two Hungarian artists. Their artworks also reflect the creative background of contemporary art in the intersectional field of art tradition and globalization.

Yavan and Angelika Tóth belong to two generations. Yavan’s painting elements emphasis on history, religion and culture. He uses Cubism and Islamic decorative style to express the icon culture and eastern European folkway and scenery. Angelika Tóth’s artworks absorb her travel feeling of different cities and the experience of computer images.

Just as she described, the contemporary public places of each city contain double features like chaos and order, ideal and hostility. Even though Yavan’s artworks involve cultural tradition and religion, they actually include the human pervasive tendency and its irreconcilable difference in different cultures and religions.

While, artists place these convergence but conflicting relations in a picture, and endow them with a kind of individual beautiful emotion, no matter sad or Art Deco. After Columbus discovered the New World, art became a distinguished crossing for individual through culture. Therefore, modern art changes to a transcultural language. Contemporary art is an individual creation between the cultural roots and globalization.

With the popularization of the knowledge of modern art history, it is not a problem that human appreciate others’ arts. For the spectators of Beijing 798 Art Zone, the art languages of the two Hungarian artists are incompletely strange.

(Written by Zhu Qi)