Ye Hongxing - East of Eden

Ye Hongxing was recently selected by the Asian Art Museum in California and the director of Art Cologne as one of China’s top twenty rising artists. Her works - massive, technicolour mosaics - initially look like bright, large paintings of traditionally ‘Chinese’ subjects – abounding as they do with tigers, buddhas, pagodas etc. It’s then that you notice they their curious juxtaposition with cars, military vehicles, and other mechanisms of the modern world – and curiouser still, her images are made up of thousands and thousands of kaleidoscopic, brightly coloured, mass-produced children’s stickers. 

This exhibition is the latest product of a Western thirst for Chinese Contemporary art. The big auction houses and commercial galleries are moving in or bringing out Chinese artists as both a new source of talent and – we suppose – a new market. Restrictions on art and artists in China are certainly still in place, with big stars like Ai Weiwei being followed or arrested and exhibitions being subject to closure orders. Nevertheless, there is a recent growing tolerance to artists in China, and the scene is booming in the East and West as a result.

This complex set of circumstances has recently given birth to big names such as Zeng Fanzhi, Cai Guo-Qiang and indeed Ye Hongxing. Their works betray a complex mix of Eastern and Western influences: classical-style landscape painting executed in ancient ink-and-wash painting traditions, and fiercely political ‘Cynical Realist’ art, which looks to Western art for inspiration and applies it to Chinese concerns. The work is often simultaneously humorous and straight-faced, switching between disdain for Western Capitalism and Chinese Communism. Most obviously: it is unabashedly political, and believes the world to be a cynical place.

In Ye Hongxing’s work, the gaity of the rows upon rows of mass-produced Angry Birds and Hello Kitty stickers from which her works are built up is played off against the guns, helicopters and paraphernalia of industry that the pieces at large depict. These eye-catching pieces represent China’s interaction with the West and with its own history and landscape. The stickers, “made in China” and shipped by the pallet-load to the West, are, ironically, pieced together with a painstaking eye for detail and discipline. They play with dual Chinese traditions of mass-production and hand-craftsmanship in one sitting. And beyond this they are, in every sense, colourful.

Admission: FREE Address and map: Scream London,  27 - 28 Eastcastle Street,  London,  W1W 8DH

Nearest tube: Oxford Circus