At a time when the geopolitical climate is increasingly defined by friction and protectionism, Mirror in Others: The American Experience of Chinese Contemporary Artists, serves as a vital cultural intervention.
The exhibition, which opened at the Beijing American Center on March 6, curates the works of nine Chinese artists who lived, studied, or worked in the United States between the 1980s and the early 2010s.
The featured artists—Yuan Yunsheng, Xu Bing, Li Xiangyang, Zheng Xuewu, Feng Lianghong, Cai Jin, Xing Danwen, Huang Qingjun, and Bing Yi—represent a broad generational span, with birth dates ranging from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Rather than a simple survey of "East meets West," curator Li Jin presents a sophisticated thesis: that American culture and society acted as a psychological mirror. By navigating an "unfamiliar cultural environment," these artists did not merely adopt Western styles; they used the presence of the "other" to rediscover and reshape their own artistic identities.
Refining the lens
For example, artist Xing Danwen's move to New York in 1998, at the age of 31, to study at the School of Visual Arts, marked a pivotal period in her career, during which she transitioned from a documentary photographer to a conceptual artist.
The Beijing exhibit features her video installation Sleep Walking (2001) and two photographs from her "disCONNEXION" series (2002-2003). Weaving together images of New York's cityscapes accompanied by a soundtrack composed with Chinese traditional instruments and sounds of daily life in Chinese cities, the video examines the effect of dislocation and evokes a sense of loss and displacement in the age of globalization. Her series offers a jarring look at the environmental toll of consumerism, capturing electronic waste from developed economies being recycled by villagers in Guangdong province.
Similarly, Huang Qingjun used his move to the US in 2010 to expand his long-term project, Family Stuff. Originally started in 2003 and hailed by late Robert Frank, a documentarian of the postwar American landscape, as "an open window to look at China," the series features families posing with their belongings in front of their homes.
"The US is an immigrant country where I've seen new lifestyles," Huang noted at the opening. "This has opened new ground for my art, through which I intend to explore the relationship between materials and identity."
The exhibit showcases 12 photos of diverse American families taken between 2022 and 2025, offering a window into the internal structure and diversity of contemporary American society.
Abstraction and alienation
Shanghai-born painter Feng Lianghong, 64, moved to the US in 1990 and subsequently settled in New York, where he spent over a decade exploring the expressive potential of color and rhythm in his abstract canvases. His works, free from narrative, communicate directly through sensation, allowing viewers of different cultural backgrounds to appreciate them through perception rather than interpretation, according to the curator.
While some thrive on the novelty of a new culture, others experience displacement as a loss. Cai Jinmay fall into the latter group. While living in New York from 1997 to 2007, she channeled the loneliness of the expatriate experience into her signature Canna Lilyseries. Her strikingly red canvases of withering yet unyielding plants—a flora familiar from her childhood in East China's Anhui province—transformed her isolation into a powerful visual language of resilience.
"On an unfamiliar ground, artists are compelled to see anew, feel anew, and think anew, allowing the obscured 'true self' to gradually surface through artistic creation," curator Li Jin writes in the exhibition statement.
Li also notes that the free, inclusive artistic environment of the US offered expat Chinese artists a fresh visual experience while simultaneously prompting them to reconsider Chinese cultural traditions from another perspective.
Yuan Yunsheng, the eldest of the group, was a pioneer. He first gained fame—and sparked heated debate—in the late 1970s with his mural Water Splashing Festival–Ode to Life at the Beijing Capital International Airport. In 1982, amid the controversy surrounding his departure from social realism, he traveled to the US as a visiting scholar.
During his 14 years in the US, Yuan engaged with post-war giants like Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. He discovered a striking resemblance between American Abstract Expressionism and the centuries-old tradition of wenrenhua (Chinese literati painting), as both prioritized self-expression over technical realism. His 1991 work, Inaccurate Distance, exemplifies this dialogue, clashing traditional ink with vibrant wax, gouache, and egg tempera.
Since his return to China, the art educator has spearheaded the national project to reconstruct the Chinese art education system, for which he champions establishing an advanced art education rooted in Chinese art traditions and techniques.
The homage to wenrenhua also informs the work of the late artist Li Xiangyang. His painting A Tribute to Ni Zan 3 (2017) juxtaposes the "quiet emptiness" of 14th-century master Ni Zan with the dynamic gestures of modern abstraction.
Interestingly, Li is the only artist in the exhibit who never lived in the US, yet the curator argues his inclusion is essential: his work was heavily influenced by American Abstract Expressionism during his time in Italy, highlighting the borderless nature of artistic movements.
New landscapes
Bingyi, 51, a Beijing-born artist with a PhD in art history from Yale University, has reimagined traditional Chinese shanshui (mountain and water) landscape painting for the contemporary era, revitalizing the ink tradition as a dynamic and evolving art form.
She has produced monumental, site-specific ink paintings in nature, allowing natural forces such as gravity and wind to replace the traditional brush—seamlessly blending ancient Chinese ink art with elements of land and performance art. In contrast, her other works use fine-line xieyibrushwork—nuanced and semiabstract—to express subjective perception rather than objective reality.
Bingyi's "Impossible Landscapes" series includesLife and Death(2018), a work featured in the Beijing show. Through its rhythmic, repetitive brushwork depicting waves, the piece mesmerizes viewers and serves as a metaphor for life's cyclical nature.
Building bridges
The expatriate experience in the US has enabled some artists to broaden their artistic vision or deepen their understanding of heritage and identity, while others draw inspiration to bridge cultures through art.
Artist Zheng Xuewu, 62, has played an important role in facilitating Sino-US artistic exchanges. His labor-intensive installation Century Text (2006-present), weaves global newspapers into paper rolls resembling ancient Chinese bamboo slips, fostering a dialogue between present and past, modernity and tradition, East and West.
Artist Xu Bing, who arrived in New York in 1990 at the age of 35, turned his experience of being a foreigner as a creative tool. Continuing his interest in deconstructing languages and semiotics, the artist developed "Square Word Calligraphy," a unique writing system marrying the English alphabet and Chinese calligraphy.
Xu assigned each English letter a specific stroke or component that fits into a square shape, making English readable in a Chinese format and endowing the Western language with a calligraphic beauty. Blowing in the Wind, a new work the MacArthur fellow made for the Beijing exhibition in 2025, forces English-speaking viewers to "unlearn" their language to appreciate Bob Dylan's lyrics through a fresh, calligraphic lens.
Mirror in Others: The American Experience of Chinese Contemporary Artists, running until March 23, is part of a series of events organized by the Beijing American Center to celebrate the 250thanniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence.
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