Conceptual artists Chen Shaoxiong and Liu Ding began collaborating in 2010 with their ongoing series “Project without Space.” Each iteration of the project uses a combination of new media and painting to inspect the intersection of contemporary Chinese identity and western art history. In 2011, they produced a series of paintings of canonical masterpieces from modern and contemporary art overlain with each other in a tromp-l’oeil fashion, in a critical look at the status of art in the global market and Chinese culture. Chen says of the works: “The purpose is to mock renowned foreign artists such as Jackson Pollock, Chuck Close, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and so on without any malicious or sarcastic meaning. It’s an alternative, joking salute to the artistic genius.”