Many Chinese struggled with the new freedoms and outside contacts, but artists revelled in them. Contemporary art was alien, its idioms and vocabulary borrowed from the West. But its limitless possibilities opened up artists’ imaginations. With energy, wit and finesse, they set about learning this new creative language. In doing so, they made contemporary art speak Chinese.

Today China is home to a creative reformation that is changing Chinese and contemporary art alike.

It draws inspiration from calligraphy and Impressionist painting, Taoism and the Internet, Beijing street life and global business, kung fu and genetic science. Some artists are reinventing traditional Chinese forms using video, plastic and robots. For others, the message is all that matters; their artistic language is a global one, with hardly a hint of ‘Chinese’. REFORMATION shows this vibrant avant-garde at their best: confident, audacious, commercially savvy, the boldest experimenters in what the head of China’s national art academy calls “the most experimental country in the world”.