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China’s changing representation of women is still a relatively new thing, and maybe one that hasn’t made a wave all the way around the globe yet, but if you ask Julie Segraves, director of the Asian Art Coordinating Council in Denver, it takes a young woman to translate that shift to the world in visual terms. And one fresh female photographer in China, Chen Man, fills those high-heeled shoes to perfection by way of her ultra-modern 3-D computer-rendered images that could only be dreamed up by a new generation.
Segraves was tapped to curate A New Attitude: Chen Man’s Provocative Interpretations of Contemporary Chinese Women, a new exhibition — and Chen Man’s first solo show in the U.S. — which opens today as part of RedLine’s yearlong focus on women artists. “Chen Man has grown up in a time period unique to her generation of people in China, who are in their late twenties and early thirties. She’s had access to social media and computers and had all sorts of opportunities to learn various types of new media that previous artists didn’t have,” Segraves says. But, she adds, “I was struck by how beautiful the images are, but they also have some sort of content or cultural dimension — a focus on women, a focus on politics and what China has faced in the past.”
See a variety of works by Chen Man — from a series of nine-foot-tall large-scale images on a traditional Chinese Four Seasons theme where she’s placed her female subjects in “fantasy landscapes she has created using computer software,” Segraves says, to another series made for the Beijing Olympics that tracks Chinese history from the rise of the People’s Republic to the present — when A New Attitude opens tonight with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. at RedLine, 2350 Arapahoe Street. The exhibit runs through April 27; find more information at redlineart.org.
Sat., March 1, 7-10 p.m.; Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: March 1. Continues through April 27, 2014
