Fang Lijun
This 45-year-old artist from Hebei is one of the third generation in China's modern art scene. A founder of the "Cynical Realist" style, Fang is known for his oils of iconic bald heads, expressing rogue humor, boredom or pain. As one of the most pessimistic contemporary painters in China, he uses glum expressions to highlight the plight of the individual, the absurdity of authority and the deep complexities of Chinese culture.
Gu Dexin
Gu is widely considered to be the most enigmatic and evasive figure within the contemporary Chinese art scene. He expresses the search for a kind of anarchic freedom through the creation of a fairytale world inhabited by cheerful-looking hermaphrodites. Gu's installations and performances, in which he often plays with the process of the decomposition of food, in particular apples and meat, similarly reject an acceptance of boundaries and conformity.
Zhang Xiaogang
Born in 1958, Zhang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. His Bloodline series of paintings, which are often black and white, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark eyes, posed in a stiff manner, deliberately recalls family portraits from the 1950s and 60s.
