Li Bo disregards the conventions of composition and scale and depicts his subjects in the same size along a linear path. According to the artist, the string of apparently unrelated objects in Li Bo’s enigmatic painting should be viewed in context of television, other media outlets, and particularly the Internet, where random “surfing” can provide serendipitous juxtapositions, even poetic insights.

Referring to the Internet as the defining medium of his generation, Dr. Lydia Thompson of Thompson & Martinez Fine Art Appraisals, Inc. calls Li Bo’s tabulation of images “a kind of visual language.”

Like the artists of the early Pop Art movement, Li Bo uses found objects as the subject of his work, inviting us to examine his imagery, free-associate and create our own meanings.

See more of Li Bo’s artwork here

According to a review in the “Guangdong Province News,” Xiong Lijun is an outstanding example of the generation of artists born around the 1980s.

“Hoo Girl Girl Girl,”  a 62-by-78-inch painting done in 2003, is typical of her work–three dancing young women, decked out in very trendy clothes and shoes, their orange hair contrasting sharply with water splashing across a lime-green background.

“Her works express fresh visual images and a clearly individual artistic language, most obvious in her acute attunement with and masterful depiction of modern metropolitan youth culture,” the article states.

Xiong Lijun’s inaugural important exhibition was in a satellite of the first Beijing Biennale, where she showed a gigantic triptych titled “I Enjoy, I Am.” Its subject matter, which she has continued to develop, was young people who exemplify infinite enthusiasm, energy and imagination, as well as boldness and independence of character.

“She is obviously centered on the positivism of her own generation and its wholehearted enthusiasm for urban life and its consuming pleasures. Her work conveys a sense of personal and social liberation within a new metropolitan culture. In short, Xiong Lijun presents and celebrates new Chinese youth culture in bloom amid overall and continuing urbanization,” the unnamed reviewer continues.

The review concludes with  the observation that “the work of Xiong Lijun is testament to China’s cultural transformation; her paintings definitively constitute Chinese contemporary art.”

See more of Xiong Lijun’s artwork here

This 25-year-old Chinese artist clearly sees his swiftly evolving nation and its soaring economy as in its infancy, its traditions coming under the influence–not always for the better–of the decadent United States, with its icons of Coca Cola, cigarettes, hamburgers and orange juice.

Coming at a time when China’s widespread industrial and manufacturing abuses are being disclosed, Kang Can’s babies remind us of the vulnerability of his nation as well as its awesome potential for economic growth.

Chinese youth today dine at Western fast-food chains, keep abreast of international fashions and idolize popular stars of film and contemporary music. Using an infant as a metaphor for contemporary Chinese society, Kang Can’s paintings point out the hazards of adopting Western culture and habits.

See more of Kang Can’s artwork here

One of the more unusual developments in postwar contemporary Chinese art is the so-called “big face” school, with exaggerated heads and doll-like eyes and expressions inspired by Japanese comics.

Yang Na, 25, grew up during a period when these comics, known as manga, and their animated versions, or anime, became extremely popular throughout the world. Manga featuring superheroes and young people have become the soap operas for her generation. Their characters so well known that they are common topics of converation as well as subjects that inspire artists.

Noting that “this subject matter is a favorite of computer-age Chinese artists,” the professor and art critic Wang Lin of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute points out that “Yang Na’s works excel at gripping our attention by their bright and grandiose images…and that they offer excellent examples of the new symbolism in Chinese art, using images from contemporary cultural life to signify the psychological state of her characters and their world.”

See more of Yang Na’s artwork here

“Artists who grew up in Beijing tend to have a deep relationship with traditional Chinese culture, as well as a subtle and accurate understanding of everyday political life. Both of these are seen clearly in Lu Peng’s art…(he) has been deeply affected by traditional drama, martial arts fiction, electronic games, and Hollywood films…His works enable us to process the confused state of today’s culture and comprehend it in terms of adventure stories, painting with absurd humor and a sense of violence,” according to Zhang Zhaohui, art critic and director of Joey Art Gallery, Beijing.

He notes that “visual symbols that represent the cultural fragments are closely related to contemporary society, politics and cultural life…In the political atmosphere of China, (traditional) cultural symbols are seen as stronghold against infiltration by Western civilization.”

Lu Peng’s half-naked women “represent the psyche of some modern-day Chinese women, handcuffed by both the angst of contemporary life and the constraints of traditional ideology,” Zhaohui observes. The writhing bodies “portray people stuck in cultural interstices,” those who have lost touch with their own cultural base yet fail to identify with the contemporary alternative.

“Despite all that, some people refuse to sink into dejection, nor will they go with the muddy flow,” Zhaohui states. Instead, some emigrate, some turn to religion, while others adopt the “ideal spiritual state that many Chinese intellectuals aspire to,” which is “an unbounded openness of thought and imagination.”

See more of Lu Peng’s artwork here

“Liu Yan’s works combine the materials and techniques of traditional Chinese painting with Western representational modes and imagery,” according to Dr. Lydia Thompson of Thompson & Martinez Fine Art Appraisals, Inc.

In creating “a collage-like painting surface from China’s cultural detritus,” the artist’s “pastiche of imagery and icons from traditional China and contemporary international popular culture” contrasts representations of an emperor and empress with seminude women, punk rockers and characters from classical Chinese opera.

Liu Yan’s jarring juxtapositions of Chinese tradition with such elements of contemporary life and suggestions of ‘the unleashing of repressed sexual desire” offers a provocative comment on the tensions that lie beneath China’s integration into global culture, Dr. Thompson states.

See more of Liu Yan’s artwork here

Born in the Netherlands in 1927, Woldendorp decided to emigrate to Australia after spending three years in Indonesia while serving in the Dutch army. He had studied art and painting as a young man in Holland, and when he acquired his first camera in 1955 he saw its artistic potential at once. After honing his photographic skills through participation in several camera clubs, he began winning national photographic competitions. He quickly became well known for his artistic approach to Australia’s infinitely varied aerial landscapes, which he continued to photograph over the past 40 years and has documented in 16 books. Writing in “Rangefinder” magazine, author Peter Skinner notes that “Woldendorp’s images”–whether of designs forged by wind and rain on rock, or of the intricate and colorful abstractions of rivers and estuaries, or of desert plains–”portray the essential elements of Australia’s natural history.”

See more about this artist click here