ARTS I found the art-equivalent of Aladdin’s cave in the most unlikely of places – a courtyard house packed with 17 families, just off Shanghai’s strutting People’s Square. I’d gone there to see the artist Sun Liang, tall, ponytailed and 51. His stock is rising, fast. Not only did he represent China when it entered the Venice Biennale in 1993 but, much more recently, he was given an important retrospective at the Shanghai Fine Art Museum and was one of the stars of last year’s important Generation of 85 exhibition at Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. His work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s, confounds all the orthodoxies about what contemporary Chinese art means and looks like.
Imagine the Chinese equivalent of George Baselitz, the German artist with a lyrical leaning yet historical imagination; someone capable of the most delicate touch and of the most deliberate bluntness. One of Sun’s 1989 paintings is called “Icarus and the Nine Suns” – which marries the Greek myth of the man who flew too near the sun with the Chinese myth of the bird shot for trying to fly too far from the earth.
