Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006, featuring iconic works by renowned British artists Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Wallinger and Gillian Wearing, will open at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, south China, from 15 December, 2006. Following the closure of the exhibition on 4 February, 2007, it will then tour to Beijing where it will be shown in an expanded version at the newly opened Capital Museum from 8 March - 6 May, 2007.

At the invitation of the British Council - the UK’s leading organisation in education opportunities and cultural relations - a team of art specialists from China has curated Aftershock, the first exhibition of its kind specially selected for a Chinese audience. Spanning more than a decade, from 1990 to the present, the exhibition puts the spotlight on the period which saw British art re-emerge as a dominant force on the international contemporary art stage. It features the work of 12 of the most significant artists who came to prominence during the early nineties and whose careers are still flourishing today.

Aftershock tells the story of how the UK’s artistic landscape was revolutionised as a new generation of British artists injected a heady mix of controversy and glamour into the contemporary art world. As a result, the UK’s art market has enjoyed a spectacular resurgence, and popularity in exhibitions of contemporary art has soared, as witnessed in the runaway success of Tate Modern, London’s first museum of international modern and contemporary art which opened in 2000.

Aftershock features 8 works selected from the British Council’s own extensive collection of British art, in addition to major loans from public and private collections, and works lent by the artists themselves. It includes sculpture, painting, video installation, photography and works on paper, both early iconic works and new work made in the past year, such as Damien Hirst’s diptych, Girls, Who Like Boys, Who Like Boys, Who Like Girls, Like Girls, Like Boys of 2006, which will receive its first ever showing in China. Tracey Emin – who has been invited by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Art Biennale in 2007 – will exhibit her appliquéd armchair, There’s a lot of Money in Chairs of 1994, which is also featured in the her epic-scale photograph, Monument Valley (Grand Scale), 1995-97.

A fully illustrated bi-lingual catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition and a programme of lectures and supplementary activities will be organised in conjunction with the showings in both Guangzhou and Beijing.

At the invitation of the British Council - the UK’s leading organisation in education opportunities and cultural relations – Aftershock has been selected by three curators from China, the first exhibition of its kind specially selected for a Chinese audience.

Aftershock tells the story of how the UK’s artistic landscape was revolutionised as a new generation of British artists injected a heady mix of controversy and glamour into the contemporary art world. As a result, the UK’s art market has enjoyed a spectacular resurgence, and popularity in exhibitions of contemporary art have soared, as witnessed in the runaway success of Tate Modern, London’s first museum of international modern and contemporary art which opened in 2000.

Richard Riley, Head of Exhibitions at the British Council, who has worked closely with the Chinese team to curate the exhibition said: “As the title suggests, Aftershock is a tribute to the legacy of the 1990s and the continued impact of British contemporary art on the world stage. It is hoped the exhibition will provide a focus for discussion and debate as audiences in China are invited to engage in the success story of contemporary British art and how this cultural transformation has had a significant influence on the international art scene.”

Aftershock features eight works selected from the British Council’s own extensive collection of British art, in addition to major loans from public and private collections, and works lent by the artists themselves. It includes sculpture, painting, video installation, photography and works on paper, both early iconic works and new work made in the past year.

A fully illustrated bi-lingual catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition and a programme of lectures and supplementary activities will be organised in conjunction with the showings in both Guangzhou and Beijing.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Diptych

    A work of art comprising two separate sections, which are intended to be seen together. The panels are usually hinged together so that they can be closed like a book. This format was originally devised for portable altarpieces depicting scenes from the Christian Bible.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Photograph

    A permanent image taken by means of the chemical action of light on light-sensitive surfaces.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.