Welcome to the new headquarters of the largest free entry contemporary art museum in the world: the Saatchi Gallery. Now located in the hart of Chelsea and in the Duke of York’s palace, this new location entirly renovated by collectionist Carl Saatchi is just unmissable. “The Revolution Continues. New Art from China” is the name of the actual exhibition that counts about 15 chinese artists offering maily paintures and sculpture and few installations.
Large and high rooms, white walls and birch wood perfectly match with the disposition of the art works providing an image of innovative and contemporary art.
Few artists are actually noteworthy. The result that Zhang Huan obtaines with his Donkey is remarkable. A donkey that jumps on top of a skysraper is a valid message of the running present society, human and technological changes. This icon of modernisation gets a literal shafting from the beast of burden “proletariat” in China.
Cang Xin underlines the interaction between man and nature with a sort of art-performance. A lying down man that touches the floor with its tongue represents an internalising of knowledge and a religious communion with place/person/thing.
Terribly interesting are the works by Bai Yiluo and Shen Shaomin. Bai Yiluo with his “Civilization” made terracotta classical busts posed as emperors and pierced by agricultural tools, gives off the sense of common ground between conflict, revolution and nature.
Thus, Shaomin give a shape and a consistence to his mythologies and his scientific and anthropological knowledge. His animal skeletons show clear evidence of zoological anomalies but their are familiar and perplexing at the same time.
Plant to visit the new Saatchi Gallery and its window on conteporary China: it opens mind and souls.
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