Answer: A room filled with art.
The 3,000-pound steel monkey, an art installation featuring the auspicious creature riding on the mist, is one of more than 700 pieces at New York's Javits Center in the first exhibit attached to "Fantastic Art China," a two-year-old festival of fireworks, music and dance events honoring the Chinese New Year. The exhibit takes a sweeping look at Chinese contemporary art, much of it from students at the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
The five-day show celebrating the Year of the Monkey organized by the academy with the US-China Cultural Institute is a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it affair closing mid-afternoon Wednesday.
The free event, which will not travel from its 72,000-square foot exhibit space, features works in a range of genres including painting, sculpture, photography, interactive media and design. A five-person team from Chinese and U.S. universities has been curating the exhibit since late last year.
At the entrance, a tornado-like cone of ballet slippers reaches 20 feet in the air. "March Forward! March Forward!" by the artist Jiang Jie features more than 1,000 pink, blue and yellow dance shoes alongside a video work about a group of Chinese women who continue to practice ballet into old age.
Nearby, boxes that once held large Chinese appliances are stacked nearly to the rafters. The piece,
"Men on the Run" by Su Xinping, features painted giants hustling across its cardboard surfaces.
One of the more arresting pieces in the show, "How To," by Chinese art student Fu Shuai, features roughly 60 certificates, bank statements, visa documents and other official papers glued to a wall, all related to the 25-year-old sculptor's quest since 2009 to study in the U.S. The artist also posted the personal essay that ultimately earned him a spot in the Master of Fine Arts program at California State University, Long Beach. "My family is a very typical, restricted Chinese family," he wrote in the three-page statement. "My father is a loyal Communist, and my mother is just a working class who doesn't want any trouble. But I can't lie to myself and ignore all the issues and problems in China's society."
When he was living in Guangzhou in southern China, Fu said his art caused friction in his relationship with his parents. Now, he said, they are not concerned with what he makes because he's so far away. The work featured in the New York exhibit touches on a theme he has been exploring since he first attended art school in Guangzhou. "I've been interested in talking about topics of identity, especially between these two countries and cultural backgrounds," he said. After winning a scholarship to the southern California university, he hopes to receive his degree this spring. Now he is applying for jobs as a sculptor at a gaming firm or a car company around Los Angeles.
The exhibit also plays with history. "Birds, Insects, and Turtles" is a digitized version of a scroll depicting finely drawn creatures by Huang Quan, a court painter who died in 965. In the modern iteration, viewers can touch a screen and move the scroll's birds and insects. The installation, created with help from zoologists, features the natural behaviors and sounds of the creatures. The app, one of several commissioned by Beijing's Palace Museum, was created by the Chinese art collective Moujiti.
Organizers hope the event deepens the experience of the Chinese New Year. "The nature of the celebration goes beyond just learning a little bit about Chinese culture and fireworks," said Shirley Young, chair of the US-China Cultural Institute. "This is about learning about China in a broader way."
Source: Wall Street Journal by Ellen Gamerman
from China Travel & Tourism News http://ift.tt/1iB6EFm
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