Stories abound in the media about the vibrant economy in China, a country with a potential consumer base of over 1.3 billion people. The globalization of this new market is attributed to the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. In a 1991 speech, Deng Xiaoping advanced the country’s almost overnight transition to a market economy. The transition was expedited by access to information through electronic devices and Internet search engines. This new freedom changed the face of contemporary art in China.

In recognition of these societal and cultural phenomena, the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board organized an exhibition that explores this new frontier in the visual arts. Drawn from the holdings of two American private collections, a preponderance of the work shows a tendency for figuration by artists who received a formal art school education. With the curatorial assistance of Larry Warsh, an observer of the contemporary art scene in China and founder and publisher of Museums Magazine, a selection winnowed from these two collections makes the case for the exhibition theme. The varied faces have many common characteristics. They are mask-like, resistant to revealing an inner self, and lack natural expressions and gestures.

The Board's Fine Arts Program is grateful to Karen Smith, a British art historian who has lived in China since 1992, for the exhibition title and for her informative essay about an art movement that is too recent to present as an overview since it only began in 1985. The exhibition makes no claim to being either definitive or comprehensive in identifying artistic influences that may have given rise to new techniques, styles, and content. It does, however, lay claim to being the first to present an exhibition of contemporary Chinese artists in Washington, D.C. In time, historians will look back on this exhibition for context as to what is inherently Chinese about Chinese art at the beginning of the twenty-first century.