Contemporary Chinese

ARTWALK

We're all obsessed with China. Yet, despite all the hoopla about Chinese art, most of us in India scarcely understand its context and trends. We should start.

China is one of the most exciting centres of art today. Here, faux-protest and self-exploration jostle with conventional representation.

In recent weeks, I have been struck by the works of two artists "" Shi Guorui, 43, and Ma Dongmin, 40. Both are China educated, both Chinese (rather than diasporic) and both have offerings with freshness. They approach art differently, yet create comparable landscapes of contemporary China for their audiences.

Shi Guorui uses Camera Obscura to photograph iconic sites "" or those he believes are iconic for what they represent. This could mean San Francisco from the Alcatraz prison. Or, as in the case of his show at New York's the Chinese Contemporary, it could mean the new skylines of Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing.

Camera Obscura is a technique that requires a dark room with a pin hole that creates the photograph. It allows for a greater exploration of space and Shi Guorui allows for this with his panoramic works.

You have the sky-scrapping visage of Beijing, the glass and steel buildings, but the images are de-peopled. It's symbolic. It suggests the pace of change, the quest to become the centre of the world without the human cost in the frame.

Meanwhile, Ma Dongmin gets under the skin of things in a brilliant show, The Depth of Desire, at the Avant Gallery in New York. The language of traditional watercolours has been reinterpreted.

Traditional landscapes suggested the wholesome divinity of the natural world, the converse of the carnal.

But China has also allowed the world to become more consumerist with its low-priced goods and Chinese culture itself has been voraciously consumed. Each of Ma Dongmin's works features a woman, her face in the throes of sexual pleasure, emerging from fluffy clouds in the tradition of washed paintings.

In the first blink, it is reminiscent of commonplace erotic images. But that's a trick. Look again, and you'll ask why the spiritual and the physical are so seamless here. It's likely that Dongmin believes this is now inevitable. That these days the path to spiritual bliss is material and sensory.