imPOSSIBLE: Eight Chinese Artists

Co-curated with Clark Buchner and Michael Zheng. February - April, 2009 

Artists and Locations:

SFAC Main Gallery: Lu Chunsheng (Shanghai), Xing Danwen (Beijing), Ni Haifeng (Amsterdam), Zhu Jia (Beijing), Xu Zhen (Shanghai) and Michael Zheng (San Francisco & Beijing),

Mission 17: Yang Zhenzhong (Shanghai) and Shi Yong (Shanghai)

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and Mission 17 present imPOSSIBLE, a two-site exhibition featuring video and photography by eight renowned Chinese artists who use absurdity and theatricality to address the disorienting pace of sociopolitical and economic transformation in China. The project emerged from conversations in Beijing in 2007, where artists based both in China and the Chinese diaspora—among them Michael Zheng—reflected on the upheavals shaping contemporary life. Their works exaggerate reality through humor, irony, and fantastical narrative, exposing the contradictions of a society where radical change has become routine. In this context, theatricality serves as both critique and coping strategy, allowing artists to reconcile the past with the present while amplifying the instability of the contemporary moment.

The exhibition also considers how globalization and displacement shape artistic language. Some participants, including Ni Haifeng and Zheng, left China in the wake of Tian’anmen, filtering their responses to Chinese reality through the lens of distance and Western exposure. While their works reflect detachment, they remain grounded in cultural traditions and attuned to the absurdities of everyday life. Taken together, the participating artists’ works reveal how theatricality and satire illuminate a society in flux—one propelled by economic boom and consumer euphoria yet shadowed by erasure, corruption, and dissonance. imPOSSIBLE presents these artistic strategies not only as reflections of a rapidly mutating social landscape, but also as acts of survival within it.