Surreal Realities

Figurative painting has dominated the understanding of aesthetics and art practice in China in recent decades. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name presents three of the most important exponents of figurative painting in China, an art movement and philosophy which began with the rise of Cynical Realism and China's opening up to the West from 1985: Liu Wei, whose paintings are inspired by both Chinese ink painting and the colourism of Expressionism; Ji Dachun, famous in particular for his surreal collages in which he associatively merges the absurd in an artistically Realist manner; and Mu Boyan, who made his name from his hyperrealist sculptures in which he "portrays" only fat naked men in equally absurd, bizarre situations.