Cloud’s Nightmare, Animation 8’30″,2010

The animations and paintings of Wu Junyong have the same unsettling effect of an Aesop’s Fable or Grimms’ Fairytale. Peopled by kings, jesters, and animals, they use the language of shadow-puppetry and performance to comment on the greed and hubris of society. Almost gothic in their aesthetic, they are marked by a dark wit that seems timeless, crossing Chinese and Western mythology to expose the follies of those in authority. There is more than a little of The Emperor’s New Clothes in Wu’s work, and a strange feeling of wickedness in the fact that pictures so violent should be so appealing.

Wu Junyong’s studio is a mish-mash of paper cut outs pinned to corkboards, paintings propped up against the walls, prints hanging from the upper levels, and a quiet digital studio in the corner. It’s easy to picture him moving from one area to another, picking up different tools with which to work, depending on the mood and demands of the moment.

To meet Wu Junyong is to come into contact with the same cheeky ambiguity in his art. Hopefully something of his mischievous smile comes through in the interview posted below.

What system of classification separates an animation or documentary film from video art? None really, if you’re looking at China and the screen-based work being shown and created there. China’s is an art world still building its institutions, and with this comes a freedom from such expectations or constraints.

Laurens Tan is a digital media artist and sculptor, based in both Australia and China. With Chinese parents, but a childhood spent in The Netherlands, Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia, Tan’s background also defies simple definition. In 2006 Tan moved to Beijing, to learn the language of his family heritage, and make work as part of the thriving contemporary Chinese art scene.

Tan and I spoke recently about the flux and energy of today’s Beijing – a city Tan’s calls ‘a great little research site to consider what will happen with contemporary art.’ More specifically, we discussed Tan’s curated exhibition of Chinese video art, Arena: A Post Boom Beijing, currently at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in Sydney . This exhibition is both beautiful and provocative, and I seriously recommend seeing it if you’re in Sydney.