AMONG THE FEW hundred events that are transforming France into a showcase of Chinese culture this year, perhaps no other provides a more up-to-date, offbeat peek at contemporary China than Video Generation, which opens this month at the Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris.
The subjects are likely to catch many off guard. In a piece by Xu Zhen, for instance, two youths on a boat, their heads kept out of the frame, use the flies of their trousers as a storage space for objects that that they pull out and hand to each other. Meanwhile, the city of Shanghai is turned upside down, shrunk down and balanced on an index finger in Light as F*** by Yang Zhenzhong.
The 11 video artists - most of whose featured works were produced last year and some within the past few months - occasionally wink at the viewers in a political aside. But to read too much politics into these presentations would be to miss the point, says Michel Nuridsany, curator of the exhibition.
While there's a tendency to interpret all contemporary Chinese work in a political fashion, Chinese video artists are more concerned about other matters these days, he says. 'What's important now are new practices, new gestures, new ways of doing things that young people have. There's irony and lots of humour, along with a dose of cynicism.'
Indeed, the creators seem less the descendants of the Chinese political pop movement that was all the rage in the 1990s than the progeny of Andy Warhol, applying his peculiar brand of iconoclastic wit to the cultural and social upheaval of China today.
Humour is evident in many works. For instance, Sars Time by Beijing-based Song Dong shows a husband and wife trying clumsily to kiss each other through their surgical masks.