The Young Artists Projects at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art will make its debut with Symptoms, the first exhibition at the center in 2012. This is a long-term project of the center to be held in different ways once or twice a year, Becoming Peninsula aim is to follow, study and hold discussions about young artists, including their art practice and achievements. The catalogue for this exhibition will include curatorial articles about each artist and interviews.

This exhibition features eight artists born around the 1980s: Lu Yang, Yan Heng, Cheng Ran, Ren Hang, Li Wei, Yan Xing, Yuan Yuan and Zang Kunkun.

These artists are different from the previous generation who were mostly idealists in their youth who were obsessed by a vision of a changing destiny and building a bright future. After the social transformations in the 1990s, the aura of idealism disappeared. Business culture took root in China. This period coincided with the initial stage of the apprenticeships of the young artists as featured in this exhibition. The highly specialized division of labor and the elaborate social structure can only allow everyone a tiny position. No doubt young people can only inwardly expand their space, therefore greatly expanding their world as individuals. In the meantime, the highly developed media and technology give young people easy access to knowledge and information, greatly diversifying their own knowledge structure, so their complexity and diversity began to be highlighted. Growing up in this background, the young artists are diversified in their terms of interest.

Will such inward reflection lead to isolation from society as far as their art is concerned? It is just the opposite. These original works not only depict the symptoms found in individuals but also those in society. It is a mumbling monologue, a mixture of the dream land, sociological reflections, narration of individual experience, or unique tastes. In the spontaneous aphasia, silent and blank, it is easy to find the symptoms in an individual or society. On the one hand, we understand, to some extent, the meaning revealed in these works, and we have to find the answers to the problems these artists unconsciously hide in their works. These works are symptoms that help us to read our age, society, art, as well as these artists’ concerns.

Artists: Cheng Ran, Li Wei, Lu Yang, Ren Hang, Yan Heng, Yan Xing, Yuan Yuan, Zang Kunkun

Curator: Iberia Exhibition Department

Opening: 4 p.m. Saturday March 3, 2012

Duration: March 3, 2012---April 3, 2012

Venue: Iberia Center for Contemporary Art

Courtesy of the artists and Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, for further information please contact www.iberiart.org.