FIGURATIVE DIASPORA

　　The New York Academy of Art is pleased to announce a major exhibition: Figurative Diaspora. Co-curated by Mark Tansey and Peter Drake, Dean of the Academy, Figurative Diaspora presents works of "Unofficial Art" created by five Soviet artists and five contemporary Chinese artists. While previous exhibitions have presented Russian underground art or Chinese art after the Cultural Revolution, Figurative Diaspora will be the first exhibition to trace the direct artistic influences from the USSR to the People's Republic of China.

　　Figurative Diaspora will run January 16 – March 4, 2018 at the New York Academy of Art, 111 Franklin Street, New York, with an opening reception on January 16 and a panel discussion with artists and curators on Wednesday, January 24.

　　Starting in the 1950s, young art students in China were trained by their Soviet counterparts to make propaganda murals of Mao and utopian depictions of socialist workers. (China had no native tradition of oil painting.) Two generations of Chinese artists thus received rigorous training in the tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism and classical art-making techniques. However, in both China and Russia, small groups of artists began using their academic training to create subversive, mocking, political and in some cases life-threatening works. This was deemed "unofficial art": works made with official training but without state sanction. The SotsArt Movement in the USSR used the iconography and symbols of Soviet Russia to deconstruct and explode official myths while Chinese artists used realism to question the official utopian view of Communist China.

　　In 1994, Vitaly Komar, a key figure of the SotsArt Movement, introduced American artist Mark Tansey to a community of Chinese painters who had recently arrived in New York from Beijing. Like all state-trained artists, the Chinese painters had been drilled in impeccable Soviet Realist technique and Tansey was astonished at both the level of technical skill and its application to the figurative idiom. Tansey then organized an informal exhibition of their paintings in his New York studio,

　　entitled Transformations.

　　Twenty-three years later, the Academy's exhibition Figurative Diaspora now presents paintings by five Chinese artists, three of whom participated in Tansey's Transformations exhibition (Yu Hong, Ni Jun and Liu Xiaodong) and two of whom are part of the same school (Lu Liang and Xie Dongming). Their pieces will be shown alongside works from five Russian artists who had been creating Unofficial Art decades earlier (Erik Bulatov, Alexander Kosolapov, Komar and Melamid, Irina Nakhova and Oleg Vassiliev). Figurative Diaspora will exhibit major works from both groups, including Kosalapov's "Perseus (The Assassination of Trotsky by Stalin)" which was a centerpiece of the landmark SotsArt exhibition at the New Museum in 1986.

　　In the later part of the 20th century, figurative art had been marginalized in the West but was being preserved and deepened in China and Russia, where art schools and movements were developing their own idiosyncratic language of figurative art and using it to create fascinatingly profound and political works. Moreover, due to a shared Soviet training system, influences bled back and forth between the two art communities. The same pictorial grammar and thematic concerns unite artworks made on different continents in different decades, such as Erik Bulatov's "Red Horizon" (1971-2000), which portrays a group of office workers incongruously wandering on the beach towards an unreachable horizon and Liu Xiadong's "My Hometown" (2014) with casual figures marching single file over a state-constructed dam. Both Ni Jun's melancholy "China Central Television under Construction" (2008) and Oleg Vassiliev's stark "Erik Bulatov - Mayakofsky Square" (1995) grapple with the concept of public spaces in socialist states. Comments curator Mark Tansey, "What holds the pictures together is the similarity of gesture, the figural dynamics and the Socialist Realist voice."

　　The New York Academy of Art is mounting "Figurative Diaspora" in its role as a national leader in the promotion and preservation of progressive figurative art. "Figurative Diaspora" is made possible through the support of Cadogan Tate and the Neil K. Rector Collection.

　　ABOUT THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF ART

　　Founded in 1982 by artists, scholars and patrons of the arts, including Andy Warhol, the New York Academy of Art is a not-for-profit education and cultural institution which combines intensive technical training in drawing, painting and sculpture with active critical discourse. Academy students are taught traditional methods and techniques and encouraged to use these skills to make vital contemporary art. Through major exhibitions, a lively speaker series, and an ambitious educational program, the Academy serves as a creative and intellectual center for all artists dedicated to highly skilled, conceptually aware figurative

　　and representational art.