Since the '80s and '90s, Chinese photography has developed parallel to conceptual and performance art, often documenting these other forms and taking up their shocking visual tropes, like vividly painted nude bodies.
This kind of artistic exchange and the artists' preoccupation with Chinese consumerism results in a series of images that are unsubtle - and, given their bravado, strangely unpretentious.
The show's most famous artist is probably Bai Yiluo, who works in Beijing and has previously exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as the Federal Reserve Board in DC.
In one triptych, among the most important pieces in the exhibition, Yiluo documents three stages of a pile of portraits as they burn to ashes in front of an expansive and cold sea.
Temporality, the violence of cultural change, relationships between individual and collective identity - these are the colossal themes underlying this piece and many others. The photographs brazenly tackle the rapidity of China's contemporary cultural evolution
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