The Australian profiles Zhou Siwei, a 28-year-old artist from Sichuan, who just had his first showing in Australia. Talking to curator Simon P. Wright, the Australian identifies what it calls Post-Chinese art:

Zhou had only travelled within China and to Hong Kong before his Australian visit. Chongqing, a manufacturing centre with a population of 32 million, has no city art gallery and it is the first time a group of artists from Sichuan has been shown in Australia.

Relatively quiet compared with the busy art centres in Beijing and Shanghai, Chongqing is, according to Wright, fast becoming the focus of this new internationalism in Chinese art. Wright visited the city earlier this year and says these artists are coming out of a tertiary education system undergoing “constant reinvention”.

“It’s signified by an influx of new technologies aimed at his generation, programmed with the task of promoting celebrity and screen-based consumption,” Wright says. These artists are ambitious and in a way revolutionary, aware they are pushing against what Wright calls the “emerging orthodoxy” of contemporary art in China, a “particular look” that must connect with the avant-garde in order to have “real value”.

“It’s my guess Zhou is among a wave of young artists whose future will be less about being identified as a so-called ‘Chinese artist’ and more an artist whose work is part of an international conversation: a ‘post-Chinese artist’,” Wright says.

For Today’s Young Chinese Artists, The Chairman is History (The Australian)