Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

"What's wrong, I think, is the position of the dragon."

Wang Chuan was gesturing at one of his own photographs, an image of a bright golden statuette of a dragon — a potent image in Chinese culture, a symbol of the nation itself — presiding over a collection of grimy soup pots.

"This is a stew," he said, meaning the contents of those pots. "This is in a popular restaurant in a suburb of Beijing. It's run by the farmers who don't do farm work anymore. This is the wrong place."

Wang's dragon photos, part of "Future Returns," an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art that opened last month at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, are on their face an exploration of the hapless fate of a cultural icon.

In one image, a long costume used in the traditional dragon dance sits crumpled on the back of a three wheeler. Another shows coins tossed for luck onto the image of a dragon at a temple, all of the smallest denominations.

But, in a broader sense, they are a mediation on the erasure of tradition in a fast-changing country.

"Gradually, people begin to care if the tradition is too quick to be erased by the modernization and the development of the economy and the incoming of the culture from the Western world," Wang said. "The pace of vanishing of all the old things is shocking."

The exhibition, which includes the work of more than two dozen artists, is the first brought to the museum by Wang Chunchen, a respected art critic and head of the Department of Curatorial Research at the CAFA Art Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts China in Beijing who is also an adjunct curator for the Broad.

"China is changed greatly in the past three decades," Wang said, as he took a group of journalists, artists and translators through the exhibition last month. "So the art I selected her represents, stands for that kind of change, culturally, socially, psychologically."

And so there are works such as Jizi's ink brush paintings, which owe a clear debt to traditional Chinese landscape art, but take interstellar space as their subject matter, or Su Xinping's two "Portait" works, which, at nearly 11 feet tall, partake in the monumentality of Socialist realism without its aura of heroism.

Others works in the exhibition are operating at a further remove from such traditions. Liu Lining's "Paradise City," for instance, is a riot of violence and sex and human beings jammed one on top of the other. Painted as a tryptic, its gamut runs from the domestic to the phantasmagoric.

"His work reflects the environment that he is living in right now." A translator was paraphrasing Liu's words. "This is China. What he is hoping is, when people see his work, they get a sense of what China is like or at least what his corner of China is like."

There are pieces that can be read as more overtly critical, Wang Huangsheng's clear resin chair filled with barbed wire, the videos of He Yungchang's brutal performance art.

Or the massive iron box from Sui Jianguo titled "One Cubic Meter of Darkness," a gesture toward early 20th century novelist Lu Xun's characterization of traditional China as an "iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible." (Lu went on to ask a politically idealistic friend whether, if people were sleeping in such a house, about to suffocate, it wouldn't be kinder to let them die in their sleep than to wake them.)

Criticism of the China's capitalist revolution is not the heart of the exhibition, however. Wang, the curator, seems more intent on showcasing the range and diversity of contemporary art in China, which didn't properly exist until the 1980s and was barely known in the U.S. before the late 1990s.

And so there are pieces such as Miao Xiaochun's "Restart," a 14-minute 3D computer animation, which replicates and remixes images from at least a dozen Western artworks from the likes of El Greco, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

"I want to tell an American audience how Chinese art is diversified," Wang said.

And, if that American audience misses the points of reference, that's not all bad.

"If any works make an American audience feel unfamiliar, maybe they can go beyond," Wang said, "read more, talk more. I think they can find something about China."

If you go

"Future Returns: Contemporary Art from China" will run through March 8 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, 547 East Circle Drive in East Lansing on Michigan State University's campus.

Admission to the museum is free. For information, go to www.broadmuseum.msu.edu.