Life and dreams

Christopher Phillips, Ai Weiwei

"Since the early 1990s, photography and media art have rapidly come to occupy significant places in Chinese contemporary art. Life and Dreams : Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media Art shows the widespread adoption of photography, video, and digital imaging by successive generations of Chinese artists, as seen in a range of visually inventive and emotionally charged works. Many of them reflect the artists' immediate responses to the unprecedented changes that have swept through China in recent decades, transforming not just the urban landscape, but also key aspects of social relations and everyday life. Some of the most recent media works employ elaborately imaginative and fantasy-driven means to suggest where those changes may ultimately lead the country and its inhabitants"