Sui Jianguo´s Jurassic Age is one of the most celebrated icons of today´s Chinese Pop movement. Installed at Houston Museum, the exhibition will run through October 21, 2007.
Jurassic Age is part of the artist´s Made in China series, which are based upon mass-produced toys. While playful, the dinosaur can also be understood as personifying the unruly economic power China now commands over world markets. Collector Robert Chaney has stated: "The cage can be viewed as the prior confinement of forty years of communist rule, against which the entrepreneurial spirit raged to break out of. It can also be seen as the ubiquitous shipping container, symbolizing China´s subsequent emergence as a leader in global trade."
Born in 1956, Sui maintains a studio in Beijing. He was originally trained in the Social Realist tradition promoted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but he is now one of the foremost artists of a new movement of "Chinese Pop." Sui has commented on this work: "The reason I enlarged the toys to such an enormous size is to highlight the political economic system behind them. Dinosaur toys are designed by some company from a Western country, and produced in China, then commercially distributed to the whole globe. It is the result of transnational capitalist production."
The picture shows Sui Jianguo, Chinese, Jurassic Age (during installation at the MFAH), 2006 Collection of Robert, Jereann, and Holland Chaney, Sui Jianguo, courtesy Chinese Contemporary Gallery. -- www.mfah.org
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