What Does Chinese Art Mean Today?

According to curator Pi Li, when people overseas think of Chinese art, two things usually come to mind: cynical realism and exiled artist Ai Weiwei. Both can be considered as art of dissent; commercially, they benefitted from China’s ascent to the international stage in the 1990s and 2000s. Cynical realists including Yue Minjin and Li Wei use irony and humour to express their disillusionment with Chinese society, while Ai Weiwei is known as a vocal critic of the Chinese government.

But there’s so much more to contemporary Chinese art — which is the motivation behind Tai Kwun’s new project, Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008. It’s an ambitious six-month initiative comprising two distinct exhibitions co-curated by Tai Kwun head of art Pi Li and senior curator Ying Kwok: Navigating the Cloud and Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe. Film screenings and a publication round out the programme. With over 70 artists participating across the two exhibitions, Pi calls it “the most ambitious survey of its ilk.”

Stay Connected is two years in the making, but the seed for an exhibition showing works post-2008 was planted in Pi’s mind a long time ago. In his 2015 essay “The Plight of Post-Olympic Chinese Art,” written when he was a senior curator at M+, Pi pinpointed 2008 as being a watershed moment for the world, China and its artists. It was the year of the Beijing Olympics but also the year of the Sichuan earthquake, which killed more than 69,000 people and triggered a wave of international support. 

For Pi, it was the year when optimism about globalisation reached its peak. “Hu Jintao, Putin and Bush watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in the Bird’s Nest,” he says, referring to the renowned stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Ai Weiwei. “This image we cannot imagine anymore.” Not long after that opening ceremony, the US housing bubble burst, igniting a global economic crisis that touched every country in the world.

Asia One, 2018, by Cao Fei , ‘Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud’, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2025

A global network

Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud exposes how connected we still are, whether by necessity or choice. In Cao Fei’s “Asia One” (2018), a man, a woman and a robot find love against the backdrop of a nondescript logistics centre that sorts and packages goods for consumers globally. The yearning for connection also comes through in more intimate form in Zhang Yibei’s “Limpid, Golden, Calling” (2025). A sculpture where mushrooms and flowers sprout from air-conditioning vents, it is a reminder that we are all connected via our building’s infrastructure, whether air ducts, sewage and satellite systems. 

It’s notable that the curators have subtitled the exhibition Art and China, not “Chinese art” or even “art in China.” In a way, the show is as much about Chinese art as it is about understanding China through its art. As such, the exhibition features artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and beyond. Supplying the Globe will include Foreign Investment, a British art collective whose art examines how societies and individuals are transformed by global economics. 

Artists born or based in mainland China still dominate, with 26 out of 35 artists or art groups in the first exhibition. Perhaps one striking thing about this group of mainland artists — the majority born after Deng Xiaopeng’s 1978 reforms — is that they are integrated into global art systems at much younger ages. “A lot of them were educated in the West, they do residences around the world,” says Pi. “Naturally they’d be concerned with the same kind of global issues as artists from other places.” 

Long gone are the Chinese and political iconography and motifs. In their place are more individualistic expressions of identity. “Their identity as a woman [or] a member of the LGBTQ community — and so on — comes first, ” says Pi. “I joked that this might be the last exhibition to talk about China as a subject matter.” Yet, while Chinese artists might be concerned about the same issues, and have access to the same visual tools and language as their global counterparts, it’s their experiences of living in China that lend their works unique perspective and gravitas.

One example is “Division and Compromise: On the Geography of Images.” Artist Yu Guo pieced together original footage he took of North Korea during a residency in Changbaishan, and archival footage of China taken by American journalists after Richard Nixon’s visit in 1970, to ask the question: is my gaze of North Korea similar to the Americans’ gaze of China half a century ago? The work is further complicated by the inclusion of AI-generated images from both American and Chinese AIs, with the difference in imagery exposing the way AI biases reinforces human biases and stereotypes. 

One of the quieter but emphatic works in the exhibition is Ge Yulu’s Eye Contact (2018), in which the surveilled becomes the surveiller. The artist engaged in a face-off with a street surveillance camera until, after 90 minutes, a security guard came out to talk to him, ironically turning a tool perceived to sow distrust into one that led to a genuine interaction. 

This kind of irony and light-hearted humour underpins a lot of the works by mainland Chinese artists. In a state where speech and publication are more tightly controlled, people have found creative ways to circumvent censors in order to express themselves. “In Hong Kong, you have the rule of law,” says Pi. “In mainland China, as long as the law doesn’t say you can’t do it, you can do it. In a way, life naturally becomes a bit ironic.” Jiang Zhi’s “Eclipse” (2023) points to this. In the video, a naked woman continuously adjusts her body to keep her nipples covered by two black dots, satirising the way internet censors fervently work to stamp out dissent. 

Walking through the halls, one might notice that there is a traditional media littered through. Zhang Yibei’s sculpture is one example, Gong Jian’s paintings are another. “This show doesn’t see technology as just an artist’s tool, but as subject matter in itself,” says Pi. “How have new technologies impacted the way we make art? The way we live?” 

Gong’s set of paintings revolve around the way that media influence our access to information and knowledge. “Go Swimming this Afternoon” (2020) depicts the funeral of the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, yet the bottom half painting is not coloured in, as if the artist had run out of paint or time. In fact the art mimics what happened in reality. At one point the mourning crowd tore off the funeral shroud and Khomeini’s body fell out, prompting the Iranian state television to cut off the broadcast. “Media isn’t just entertainment, it’s a political tool,” says Pi. 

China’s place in the world

If Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud is about the impact of new technologies on our lives, Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe centres on the impact of China’s economic success. “What is the environmental cost [of development]? How has labour been redefined? What happens to the people and community in the wake of rapid development?” asks Kwok. These are all questions confronted by societies the world over, yet perhaps it’s more acutely felt in China, which underwent industrialisation in just 40 years; by comparison the Industrial Revolution in Britain took 150 years. 

Among the works in the show is Li Liao’s “Consumption” (2012), an installation of an iPhone, a labour contract as a factory uniform. Famous for using his own labour to highlight the gap between labour and consumption in modern China, in 2013, Li did a 45-day stint at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, which supplies parts for Apple products; 45 days is the amount of time a Foxconn worker would need to earn enough to buy an iPhone. 

Supplying the Globe will also feature Li Ming’s surreal moving image of an excavator trying to comb the hair of a lone figure sitting in a half-demolished building. A machine of destruction seemingly performing a tender act of care. “What and who is left behind amid rapid urban development?” the curator ponders. She hopes the show will also allow audiences to understand the world through China’s lens. 

“The energy in China is unlike anywhere else,” she says. “The way that information is spread, the people gobble up [information], then move onto something else the next day afterwards. You look at a company like Alibaba, how it grew to surpass Amazon and Ebay, combined [by sales volume], within such a short period of time.” 

Yet she also notes that the country offers up a mirror to everywhere else. There is no denying that the world is moving at an ever accelerating clip. Beyond that, what happens in one place might also be happening in another. In 2017, after China passed a law requiring Chinese data to remain in China, Apple built a data centre in Guiyang. “Today the United States has asked TikTok to keep the data of Americans in Texas,” notes Pi. The situation brings to mind He Zike’s “Random Access” (2023), a video work highlighting Guizhou’s transformation from an ancient village to tech metropolis. 

It also reminds Pi of a Chinese proverb: 三十年河東，三十年河西 (saam1 sap6 nin4 ho4 dung1, saam1 sap6 nin4 ho4 sai1) — literally “30 years in the east, 30 years in the west,” meaning the balance of power is always shifting. Does art have the ability to critique and help us reflect on these changes? 

Front: Sneeze by Lin Hanwei, back: Can’t Help Myself, by Sun Yan & Peng Yu, Stay Connected, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2025

Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud runs at Tai Kwun Contemporary until January 4, 2026. 

Correction: Due to an error in editing, Pi Li’s surname was misstated in an earlier version of this article. It is Pi, not Li. This article was also updated to clarify that each section of the exhibition was curated by both Pi and Kwok. We sincerely apologise for the errors.