Chinese galleries surprise New York audience

Armory Focus: China in New York offers a chance for Chinese artists to reach out to a broader global audience.

Horowitz says the development in China is not completely known yet to people in New York, though a number of artists work with major international galleries. The China focus in the Armory Show exposed the talents of a younger generation of artists whose approaches differ from their predecessors.

Xu Zhen, 35, this year's commissioned artist from Shanghai, installed a sculpture-cum-performance Action of Consciousness. He also secured a booth for MadeIn Company, an art-creation corporation Xu founded in 2009, which featured 30-year-old Lu Pingyuan's latest video Where Has Grandma Gone.

MadeIn launched its same-name gallery with a sound marketing campaign-it issued 100 VIP cards with a total value of $100,000 at the fair, which entitled their owners a 5-percent discount for purchases at the gallery for up to two years.

Other galleries were not in a rush to sell, but rather took their debut at Pier 94 as a good chance to raise the bar of their academic credits.

"The section as a whole aims to voice the experimental spirit of Chinese contemporary art and reach out to the greater public and hopefully other markets," says Feng Ying from Space Station, an art institution in Beijing's 798 art district that was founded in 2009 and promotes avant-garde explorations in a wide spectrum.

It presents a nine-person art group, Double Fly Art Center, from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, aged between 29 and 39. They turned the exhibiting space into a playground where viewers could play games like balloon shooting and ring toss.

The work demonstrates an entertaining sentiment that resonates with the grassroots of Chinese society, Feng says.