Who are YCA？

                                                                                                                                  Gu Zhenqing

    YCA stands for young contemporary artists, but in Chinese style, we mainly infer to the artists who were born during the 70s-80s (most of them were born around 1970-1989 about 20years of time). A great margin of those artists was able to have a decent academic art education, and of course, most of them are the only child of their family (due to the one child policy). Influence by the culture globalization, their main pressure is not from the political powers or the society itself, it is actually from the economy. There are not shortcuts for those artists (from the cold war ideology and the barrier of ideology) but on the other hand, they were facing a great disturbance of commercial interests and the temptations of it. They are the generations baptized by the methodology and values, regulations and standards. They had their own logics of understanding contemporary culture and contemporary art.

   For this generation of artists, they are not stickled to the traditional culture nor to the traditional academic art structures, even a break through to the contemporary aesthetic inertia, their thoughts, views, ideas and methods are all been through a lot of experiences, open out, and futuristic. They emphasize the idea of rational and speculate, but also suggest the idea of sensibility with intuition. They are keen on learning new things; during their practical creations, they would use the methods of misappropriation, borrowing, transplantation, conversation and improvisation. In addition, they love to create new things by themselves, enjoy making critics about the reality, the culture, and about themselves. Through criticisms and “empty out” their own selves, they create a brand new personality. Not only they are trying to emphasize the stimulation and influence that the society brings, but also emphasize the interference and disturbance that our society brings to the art industry. However, they believe that the most important thing is to identify our own culture’s logistics and work hard to create the “Chinese characteristics”. They are keen to cross the border, break through the limits, tare down the classics, crush the regulations and break down the prejudice. From their point of view, every “experiences” and “regulations” can be criticize, overturn, abandon and reconstructed. They are not tied up with a regulated “style”, materials, methods, form of art, or specific issues. They had their own views on the history of art and a special vision (or control) of contemporary art, they had their own configurations, respectful to the globalize context respectful to the globalize culture and most important of all respectful to our own culture.

   YCA is a bunch of promising young artists, not only they are the youngest generation of contemporary artists in China, but also, they are the youngest artist of Asia and the world. They are all standing on the same balk line and jumping point, but the problem is “who will be the best?”

   Now we are standing on the phase of capitalistic age, we should break through every obstacle in front of us, and create a bunch of promising Chinese contemporary artists. What’s in front of them, is the “deciding game” for the Chinese contemporary art industry.