Installation view of "Simple Life Is Interesting!” Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, New York.
Six Chinese artists, all born after the Cultural Revolution, take on a common—because politically anodyne—theme among millennials in the New China. The joys and frustrations of everyday living in a transformed (though still tradition-haunted) society are energetically explored in a variety of mediums. Pak Sheung Chuen, who represented Hong Kong at the 2009 Venice Biennale, offers a schematic wall text comprising gnomic notebook reflections. Drawing from his series “Buy Everything on You,” Liu Chuang displays personal belongings sold to him by a stranger, right down to clothes, underwear, cell phone, identity cards and family snapshots. Li Liao, in a black-screen video with white subtitles in Mandarin and English, documents his efforts to convince his girlfriend’s father that he, a poor experimental artist, would make a suitable mate for the skeptical man’s daughter.