From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a review of 28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Author Jing Cao notes: “The best works in 28 Chinese take as their subject [a] tension between material conditions and ideological constructs—between things and meanings—to offer new ways of observing the contemporary condition.” This article was originally published on June 25, 2015.

Zhang Huan. To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997; chromogenic print on Fuji archival paper; 40 ¾ in x 60 ½ in. Courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © Zhang Huan.

28 Chinese at the Asian Art Museum features works by three generations of contemporary Chinese artists, produced between 1994 and 2014, on loan from the Rubell Family Collection. Anchoring the exhibition are pieces from the contemporary canon, for instance Ai Weiwei’s A Ton of Tea (2007), a cubic sculpture of compressed tea leaves, and Zhang Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997), a photograph of an attempt to use human bodies to raise a body of water by one meter. These works, displayed on the second floor amid traditional ink landscapes and blue and white porcelain, represent iconic experiments by Chinese artists engaging with modernist sculpture and performance art.

The exhibition’s newer works, which dominate the first-floor galleries, vary somewhat in quality and lack a clear, unifying theme. Organized by medium, with oil paintings in one gallery, video art in another, this portion of the show mirrors the fractured state of China’s current art landscape and asks viewers to draw their own connections. Several works within this group explore materials in new and interesting ways.

Read the full article here.