Documentary filmmaker Robert Adanto will be joining this presentation.

Artist Wang Qingsong will present an overview of his latest works made during the last ten years which have been inspired by the dramatic transformations that have taken place inside China. His work echoes reality: issues like real-estate development, massive consumption, education failure, migration as well as globalization. What differs from reality in his work are the condensation of problems in which you find out all kinds of conflicts, contradictions, and contortions that are narrated in a very humorous manner.

Since turning from painting to photography in the late 1990s, Beijing based artist Wang Qingsong has created compelling works that convey an ironic vision of 21st-century China’s encounter with global consumer culture. Working in the manner of a motion-picture director, he conceives elaborate scenarios involving dozens of models that are staged in film studio sets. The resulting color photographs, such as “Night Revels of Lao Li”, and “Can I Cooperate with You?”, employ knowing references to classic Chinese artworks to throw an unexpected light on today’s China, emphasizing its new material wealth, its uninhabited embrace of commercial values, and the social tensions arising from the massive influx of migrant workers to its cities in “Sentry Post”, Dormitory” and “Dream of Migrants”. Lately he has continued to explore new media, video works and film-making in his new venture.

Over the last twenty years of working for the Chinese contemporary art, Zhang Fang has been an eyewitness and documenting writer. She has published quite extensively in foreign and Chinese journals introducing the China syndrome which are compounded by multi-faced social, political, economic and cultural diaspora. Now a visiting scholar at the U-M Lieberthal-Rogel Center of Chinese Studies, she has been preparing for an art exhibition and symposium to be premiered in the new gallery space of Stamps School of Art and Design besides giving a seminar course introducing students a perspective into the latest Chinese social and cultural transformations.

Robert Adanto is a Los Angeles native currently based in Miami. A classically-trained actor and documentary filmmaker, he earned his M.F.A. in Acting from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program and is currently playing Shylock in Shakespeare Miami’s production of "The Merchant of Venice." As a filmmaker, he is interested in exploring how artists respond to rapid, sometimes catastrophic change. His documentaries have looked at China’s explosive contemporary art scene ("The Rising Tide" 2008), the lives and works of Iranian female artists ("Pearls on the Ocean Floor" 2010), the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the lives of New Orleans-based artists ("City of Memory" 2014), and radical "4th wave" feminist performance in Brooklyn ("The F Word" 2015). He is currently working on “Born Just Now,” a film looking at the Belgrade-based performance artist, Marta Jovanović. His films have screened at over 40 international film festivals and have been presented at various museums around the world.