THE PATHFINDER
Huang Rui
In 1979, as one of the Stars group, Huang Rui staged the first-ever exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. Twenty years later, he put 798 on the map when he moved in, established his studio there and opened its first café. A born pioneer, he creates work that is never easy, as he marries a deep feeling for Chinese culture with sharp criticism of where it’s going.

“The Stars exhibition is now 30 years in the past, and assessed by regular standards it will certainly now seem unimportant. But one important precept was established by the Stars: the importance of always staying in opposition to the mainstream. The spirit of the Stars was to adopt an attitude of respectful independence. And I believe that I have consistently kept to that attitude ever since.”

THE ARRIVED
Zhang Xiaogang
With their haunted eyes and “birth-marked” faces, the figures in Zhang Xiaogang’s “Big Family” series are amongst the most recognizable images in Chinese contemporary art. Expressing the tragedy of personal and national history (and the fate of both to be repeated), Zhang has arrived at the pinnacle of success. The question now: Where does he go next?

“It may be that some people like particular works of yours, but you have to ask yourself: ‘Will you paint what other people like? Or will you paint what you like?’ In each of my works I want to express my integrity, my sincerity. If I just kept painting the Big Family because it was successful, it would mean I was doing it for others, not myself. That doesn’t mean I will never paint the Big Family again. Those works are like my children.”

THE OUTSIDER
Aniwar
Kashgar-born Aniwar explores beyond the established borders of Chinese contemporary art, leaving behind the political, the pop and the literal to pursue the spiritual, the transcendental and the abstract. Leading curator Karen Smith calls him “the alchemist.” Finding himself lost in the Taklamakan Desert more than 20 years ago was when Aniwar discovered what kind of artist he should be.

“I was transformed by that experience and I found new hope. What I had learned before was what people had taught me. After I had been through all that confusion and found my way again, I understood more about the true relationship between life and art. You know what real art is, and you know you can make art, and you know you can only make art!”

THE DREAMER
Cao Fei
She is a child of China’s “open door policy,” a baby of the booming Pearl River Delta. Intrigued by the uses of fantasy, Cao Fei has moved from photography and video into the online realm of Second Life where she has created a new world, RMB City.

“It’s perhaps no longer important to draw the line between the virtual and the real, as the border between the two has been blurred. In the virtual world, we are not what we originally were, and yet we remain unchanged. We’re always worrying about the virtual space’s erosion of reality, but hopefully there’s a new possibility of combination in our electronic second life, a new force which transcends this mortal coil. At reality’s end of this combined ultra-space, there is still love for simplicity and the pursuit of freedom. God loves people, but we are also each other’s salvation.”

THE BEIJINGER
Song Dong
Born in the ’60s, Song Dong grew up in a cramped house in Xisi, sur rounded by the objects his fr ugal mother hoarded against hard times. In 2002, he began to work with her to create an exhibition from this hoard, a poignant record of one Beijinger’s life. That show, “Waste Not,” has become the fi rst exhibition by a Chinese contemporary artist ever to be held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

“I was born in Beijing, grew up in Beijing, studied in Beijing and work in Beijing. I travel the world, but my love is Beijing. Fortunately, I live in a great time. The rapid vast changes here offer me many lives, many different lives beyond imagination. Many different Song Dongs can do many different things. So you must do them, even if they are for nothing – you must do them if you have the chance!”

THE RETURNED
Sheng Qi
In 1989 Sheng Qi joined the diaspora of Chinese artists, but not before he severed the little finger on his left hand, in what looked set to be one last desperate piece of performance art on his native soil. But after a decade abroad of study and success, he chose to come home, putting performance art aside to become a painter. Today, he creates canvases in his east Beijing studio that literally drip with feeling.

“After living in Italy for three years, France for one year, and England for six years, going home became important to me, although I still didn’t know where my home was in China. To see my parents’ smile, to hear my mother tongue, to smell familiar smells, all made going home seem vital. It was an animal instinct. I turned 34 that year.”

THE DISCOVERED
Jia Aili
He grew up in China’s Dongbei and his paintings resonate with the harshness of those provinces – the frontlines of industrial reform in recent decades and of wars in earlier ones. After only two years in Beijing, Jia Aili is an established artist, showing a passion for painting that sets him apart. Since last winter he has worked on a still-unfinished 12-meter-long canvas, a panoramic dystopia of wrecked planes, fallen statues and innocent children.

“Everyone knows what’s happened in China and the whole world in the last 30 years since I was born in 1979. I am simply a northerner. I have experienced the four seasons, the germinating of my body and mind, and the loss of religion. Growth goes with disillusion. Gain brings loss. Life in Beijing is like walking by the river in my hometown – I see the reflection of the sky and my young face flowing away.”

THE EDGE
Pei Li
She isn’t even sure she wants to be an artist – perhaps she’d rather be a punk. But with just one very personal work, a video called “Isn’t there something missing?”, Pei Li summed up the new back-to-basics spirit whistling through the art world, where artists are rediscovering why they wanted to be artists in the first place – creating work for themselves, not the market.

“I always work from deep feeling and I often feel angry. If you have strong emotions, it is better to create than to destroy. I think in everyone’s deepest heart there is a violent side and I want to use that violent side to create. I see my studio as a secret garden in which I can make things grow.”