Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection

Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection offers a fascinating survey of the Chinese art and cultural scene post–Tiananmen Square. Contemporary Chinese art is often discussed as a cynical reaction to emerging consumerism or as a satirical response to the academic patriotism of Socialist Realism. This richly illustrated catalogue reveals the work to be more haunted than cynical, more a matter of a nation’s suppressed psychic expression than of Pop iconoclasm or ironic detachment. Approximately fifty paintings, sculptures, and installations by artists such as Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun, Li Songsong, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhang Huan convey a sense of the shadows and masks that have haunted the Chinese collective psyche during the nation’s troubled process of modernization.