Araki’s Friends by Tu Hongtao.

Click here to see the exhibition online

Featuring six post-1970s Chinese artists, group exhibition “Fly Through the Troposphere” kicked off Saturday at Beijing’s Iberia Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), 798 Art District.

‘Drifting Generation’ “Chinese people born in the 1970s or 1980s have gone through the most rapid changes in China,” said exhibition curator Zhu Zhu.

“The troposphere is the [atmosphere] with the greatest turbulence, where changing weather conditions originate. [It] serves as an analogy for the past three decades in China.”

“Since 1985, painting is undeniably the mainstream art in China,” Xia Jifeng, director of ICCA, noted. “But these six artists more or less deviate from the mainstream style; each of them possesses idiosyncratic char-acteristics without even a little bit of similarity with each other…

“Even though there’s a couple of quasi-installation artworks, they still support or assist in the consummation of painting.”

White Group Portrait by Li Qing.

Nowadays, few young artists con-centrate on painting, said Xia.

Jia Aili, Li Qing, Qin Qi, Qiu Xiao-fei, Tu Hongtao and Wang Guangle are exceptions.

The term “Drifting Generation” was coined by the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly newspaper a few years ago to refer to “the post-1970s generation, who left their homeland and migrated to megacities, in pursuit of modern life,” as Zhu puts it.

None of these Troposphere artists are Beijing natives. “This generation signifies a transition away from the modernist orientation toward a post-modernism which eliminates a heroic, elitist mentality.

“They experienced free-fall and fragmentation in a time of suspended moral judgments and indefinite value standards,” Zhu continued.

Qiu Xiaofei, 34, is showcased at the back of the hall. One series, called Childhood Photo Albums, is composed of 10 photo-sized paintings, using mixed-media materials.

Born in Heilongjiang Province and moving to Beijing when 11, Qiu is more nostalgic than his peers. How-ever, “neither verbal discussion nor written descriptions can thoroughly interpret the essence of paintings, a visionary art… The audiences have to watch, see or appreciate the artworks by themselves,” Qiu said.

Li Qin, 30, the youngest of the six, has two paintings entitled White Group Portrait and Black Group Portrait, both of which feature fridges. Li explained that such common commodities caught his interest last year.

“I chose fridges... because they imply a paradox. Fridges preserve food, but ironically, they will ultimately become a waste,” Li said. “Also, white and black, reality and an inverted reflection in water, portray a contrast [which] can still apply to human be-ings’ self-images.”

“Treatments of everyday experi-ence... can be understood as, first of all, resistance... against grand narra-tives and collective forgetting,” Zhu explained. “These treatments can be apprehended as soul-records left behind while passing through the labyrinth of reality.”

These artists have experienced, doubted and pondered the relation of self to this indescribable era. “History is also the history that relates to an individual,” Qiu explained.

Fondness for ruins

Consciousness of mortality is a common thread. One phenomenon common to this group of young artists, especially when configuring ultra-large works, is their tacit accord on the use of ruins as subject matter.

“Ruins,” “fossils,” or “mound of refuse” are all words found on labels of artworks by Qiu.

Tu, 35, also represents this concept with human and paper heaps. His paintings Araki’s Friend and Remorseless Sky convey a ruinous sense of chaos. “If we say that, in his early works, this chaotic feel is associated with a carnivalesque atmosphere, then a note of doubt soon begins to creep in,” said Zhu.

“The modern metropolis itself is depicted as a heap, projecting dual im-ages of a carnal paradise and spiritual wasteland. The city exemplifies the modern world and is subjected to scru-tiny and interrogation as such.”

Wang’s Terrazzo implies mindful-ness of time and nature. “The inspira-tion of this work actually comes from a trip with my friends to Beidaihe. My friend gave me a piece of terrazzo, which was egg-shaped and may have been washed thousands of times by the tides,” Wang recalled.

“From a social perspective, this is just a piece of useless construction waste carried by rivers, but I see the passage of time on this terrazzo. I collected waste terrazzo, polished them... I imitated water erosion, giving new shapes to them,” he continued.

To Zhu, this cheap, durable mate-rial can be seen as a fragmentary memory of ruins, for objects taken from a demolition site are proof of the buildings that once stood there.

A documentary featuring interviews about the artists and their 36 works is playing at ICCA during the exhibition, which will last until August 27.

Over the next two years, the show will also stop at Inner Mongolia’s Erdos Museum, Shanghai’s Himalayas Art Museum, and galleries in Europe and South American, according to Xia.