In Time for Lunar New Year, Four Artists Take a Hard Look at Chinese Reality

The artists—Lin Jingjing, Wang Guofeng, Zhou Wendou, and Ma Sibo—work in a range of mediums, including photography, painting, and installation. What brings them together in de Sarthe’s group show, “You, I, Among us,” is a shared impulse to challenge social norms and raise questions about current events, politics, the environment, pop culture, consumerism, and the intersection between public and private spheres.

It goes without saying that contemporary China, vast and quickly changing, is a complicated place for outsiders to understand. In “You, I, Among us,” the artists suggest that the social and political landscape isn’t easily comprehensible from an insider’s perspective, either. In her “Public Memory” series, for instance, Lin Jingjing subverts images of familiar figures—police officers, politicians, schoolchildren in uniform—to pose questions about power, numbness, and the nation’s troubled human rights record.

Wang Guofeng, too, transmits a sense of social chaos with his “Memory” series, in which he fuses the still frames of historical documentaries to create abstract visual images. “Whether history is still meaningful,” the artist writes, “becomes a question when its authenticity has turned vague, distorted or subjectified, abstracted.”