Like many aspects of contemporary China, the art world also suffers from being constrained by grand narratives of invariably foreign origin. MoCA’s “+Follow,” an excellent survey of young artists, dashes this homogenous art story by taking a laissez faire attitude to curating. Curator Wang Weiwei allows the different artists to prosper under their own conditions.

aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) is one of China’s premier digital artists and, for this show, he displays algorithmically produced images of drifting clouds on a series of short concrete plinths. The piece, Cloud Data, is a meditative take on the tensions between transcience and permanence that arose during the digital era. It is also in conversation with two other great artists: Alfred Steiglitz’s Equivalent series of clouds is a direct visual forebearer, and Robert Smithson, whose Yukatan Mirror Displacement, 1969, also recalls the logic of presence and absence.

Picking up a similar strand of American minimalism is Li Cao. In Jungle, 2010, the artist casts a latticed cube of concrete. Behind it are a series of photographs showing the building of the cube and the construction of highrise buildings, whose skeletal beginnings are echoed in the sculpture. Since it refers to the real world, Jungle should not be viewed as a revival of non-representative sculptures. Rather, it comments on the gap between idealism and actuality. The sculpture, so formally beautiful, is already blooming hairline stress fractures. This delicacy isn’t incidental, it’s the point.

Upstairs, the work of Liu Ren and Han Feng also deals with the theme of transcience. Liu Ren has a masterful multipart installation where he copied over 4,000 words (randomly selected from an English vocabulary book) on the interiors of eggshells. Some are displayed, along with a vitrine filled with the dust of others that are displayed. The artists’ focus on the pitfalls of linguistics and memory is quite relevant, especially in a landscape dotted with advertisements for English First.

Han Feng’s paintings and installations are a nice complement to Liu’s. The painter won the John Moores Prize for Big Airplane, 2009, a minimalist, faux-juvenile piece that is on display and retreats into issues of formalism. It is composed as a giant X, suggesting not progress, but negation. He expands upon this with Island, a floating city of miniature buildings suspended by fishing line. When people pass through the gallery, the whole thing sways in the wind.

DETAILS

What: +Follow

Where: MoCA | 231 Nanjing Xi Lu 南京西路231号

When: Now through May 29

Tel: 6327-1282

Web: mocashanghai.org