World in their hands

CONTEMPORARY Chinese art has generally been concerned with China itself. That's no surprise - the political and social upheavals of the country have given artists much on which to comment. But Democracy Forever, a nine-artist show at the New York City branch of Hong Kong's Plum Blossoms Gallery, highlights a new approach. Fuelled by the events of September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the exhibit shows young artists looking beyond domestic issues to comment on international politics.

'Democracy Forever is a statement about global issues,' says the show's mainland-born curator George Chang, who's co-ordinating the show as part of New York's Asian Contemporary Art Week. 'It's a representation of what's going on in the art world in China and, on a wider scale, what's happening in the country as a whole. Nowadays, Chinese people can follow international events on the internet and on television - the country is nowhere near as insular as it used to be. Young artists have developed an active interest in global affairs, and this surfaces in their work.'

Their comments on global issues tend to be direct and specific. Multimedia artist Qing Qing represents the destruction of the World Trade Centre as a child's nightmare, complete with a toy police car and skeletal wooden dinosaurs. Shanghai collective Unmask use plastic figurines to comment on the war in Afghanistan, distorting them into strange elongated shapes and dismembering the bodies of plastic soldiers. Wu Shaoxiang welds together coins from around the world to form a giant cat, as if to show the predominance of commerce over political philosophy in the 21st century.

'We got the idea for the show because of the presidential election here in the US,' says Chang. 'The election, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have made democracy a talking point all over the world. Democracy has become a global issue. We thought it would be interesting to show that other countries have a different viewpoint to the US on the subject.

'We didn't have a political agenda to push,' says Chang. 'We just invited artists to express their feelings on the topic. We wanted to show how Chinese artists feel about what's going on around the world right now.'

Chang spent time searching studios on the mainland for relevant artworks. 'A lot of the time, the artists had already created suitable works. The topic was something that they'd already become concerned about. Unmask had made their installation two months after the war started in Afghanistan, it was something they felt strongly about,' he says. 'Only two pieces were made specially for the show. It's important to point out that we didn't invent this theme. It's a definite reflection of what's going on in Chinese art.'

Unmask's installation, The Shadowless, is perhaps the highlight. It comprises three futuristic shapes which contain distorted plastic model figurines. 'Unmask are three young guys from Shanghai,' says Chang. 'They're sculpture majors from the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing. Of course, they didn't learn anything like this at the academy, which teaches traditional approaches to stone and plaster. This installation is a kind of fantasy. It's very new - no one from the older generation would think of doing something like this.'