Go Figure!

Contemporary Chinese Portraiture

Previous exhibition

from Thursday 13 September 2012 until Sunday 17 February 2013

The National Portrait Gallery and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation present the exhibition Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture to Canberra and Sydney audiences.

Untitled, 1995 by Fang Lijun

Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture is the result of a partnership between the National Portrait Gallery and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. The two-site exhibition brings together works by artists living and working in mainland China who engage with the circumstances of life through portraiture, broadly defined. The portrait of a figure or a face becomes a means to express larger concerns about the situation of China and its people in the present. The works, spanning the decades since the beginning of China’s ‘open door’ policy in 1978, are drawn from the Sigg Collection, Switzerland and the M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong, together one of the world’s most important collections of experimental Chinese art.

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
13 September 2012 – 17 February 2013
$10 / $8 Circle of Friends and concessions
Children 12 and under free

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
15 September – 1 December 2012
Free

17 portraits
view all

Mao Zedong, red grid no. 2, 1988 by Wang Guangyi

Untitled (Mao Marilyn), 2005 by Yu Youhan

1 Portrait no. 3, 2005 by Li Dafang. 2 Pimple, 2007 by Yang Na. 3 Mao Zedong, red grid no. 2, 1988 by Wang Guangyi. 4 Red child, 2005 by Zhang Xiaogang. 5 Untitled (Mao Marilyn), 2005 by Yu Youhan. 6 Untitled, 1997 by Zeng Fanzhi. 7 Newspaper reader, 2004 by Ai Weiwei.

East Village, Beijing no. 20 (Zhang Huan, 12 Square Metres), 1994 by Rong Rong

Featured Artists

Find out more about six of the artists represented in the Go Figure exhibition. Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Yang Na, Yu Hong, Rong Rong and Zhang Xiaogang.

About the exhibition

Portraits from the Sigg collection, from 1979 to the present including painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation.

On the wall – Guangzhou (II), 2002 by Weng Fen

Exhibition themes

The four main themes of the exhibition: About face, Body politic, Skin deep, and Self reflex.

Past, present, future, 2002 by Wang Qingsong
M+ Sigg Collection

Chinese Art

A short overview of modern Chinese art from 1949 to the present.

References

About the exhibition curator Claire Roberts, and writers Eugene Wang and Zhang Letian.

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Go Figure!