The art on display in "From the 11th Chinese National Art Exhibition 2009: Contemporary Fine Art from China" at the Nara Prefectural Museum of Art is of a different species than the headline-grabbing pieces that have propelled Chinese art into a much sought-after commodity frequently at the forefront of art-world conversations.
It is remote from the work of artists such as Zhu Yu, who claims to have eaten child fetuses in his performances, or the fireworks of Cai Guo-Qiang. Instead, here is art that acts as if Modernism, or anything more recent, never occurred and is, in essence, a contemporary social realism.
This is due in part to the nature of the exhibition and the marshaling of particular perspectives. Begun in 1949 and held at five year intervals, the Chinese National Art Exhibition is a kind of equivalent to Japan's fine art exhibition, the Nitten. The show is divided into 10 genres, such as Chinese ink painting, oil painting, sculpture, engraving and other such. Several thousand entries are whittled down to a few hundred by a jury, and the best are awarded gold, silver and bronze medals. Of those winners, 80 works are presently touring Japan as part of friendly China-Japan relations.