Image © Yang Guowei Things Longed For - Lidong 2006

PADDINGTON, NSW, AUSTRALIA.- The Australian Centre for Photography presents Generation C: New Chinese Photomedia in an Age of Change, on view through 8 March 2008, curated by Alasdair Foster. Complex, contrary, creative: this exhibition showcases work by young photomedia artists from mainland China who reflect the ambivalence of their times. Born in the seventies they are the first 'me' generation - consumerist, connected and self-aware. They are vain yet vulnerable; wired yet lonely. They ride the rollercoaster of 'progress' while wistfully dreaming of the past. Abandoning any notion of the photograph as a document of the real each work is a performance, a visual fable that finds its truth in imaginative resonance rather than hard evidence.

Playful yet earnest, while some artists wield satire like a sword others evoke a quiet melancholy for lost tradition. Others still, weighed down by the burden of duty to family, ancestors, community, state and the competitiveness born of consumerism, simply imagine what it would be like to fade into another world or fly away like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Generation C is supported by the City of Sydney Chinese New Year Festival. (www.artdaily.com)

Image © Qiu Zhen My Bride and I #4 2006.