'Six 21st-Century Chinese Neo-Pop Artists'
by Richard Speer
ARTnews, April 2008, p. 149
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Adopting a Pop esthetic, the six artists of this show variously celebrated and critiqued the transformation of China's economic and social landscape. This pairing of style and theme proved fruitful, playing up Pop's facility for communicating a wry detachment from, and simultaneous breathless engagement with, consumerism.

Painter Kang Can positions baby boys - coveted in one-child Chinese families - on the verge of jeopardy. One crawls along an enormous burning cigarette, another teeters on the lip of a beer mug, and one struggles to crawl out from under an artery-clogging jumbo cheeseburger. Set in front of flat backgrounds, the guileless babes seem to stand in for national traditions endangered in the infancy of China's economic boom.

Li Bo deploys similarly flat backgrounds in paintings of objects lined up side by side, regardless of proportion: an AK-47 the same size as a potted flower, a schoolgirl next to a human heart. These create a pictographic commentary on hot-button issues facing the country: human-rights violations, drug trafficking, prostitution, and organ harvesting.

Taking a different tack, two artists juxtapose imagery from historical and modern China, not always effectively. Lu Peng's gouaches on rice paper tend toward an unvaried palette and compositional fussiness that detract form their impact. Liu Yan's more spacious approach serves her mixed-media works well; punk rockers and thong-clad strippers mix with traditional Chinese domestic scenes, as in the nudgingly provocative Man's World (2007).

Yang Na and Xiong Lijun contributed the show's most exuberant, least conceptual pieces. Awash in hot pinks and acid greens, Xiong's portraits of doe-eyed glamour girls with pouty lips and overzealous mascara are especially garish. The works at once convey the vacuity of pop culture and the continuing seductiveness of Pop art.