But that isn’t the whole story. Creativity also draws energy from unfreedom, from artists’ reactions to the strictures of political control and social convention, and from their search for unexplored spaces and fresh perspectives within established forms. For Chinese contemporary artists, the tension between surging individual freedom and unrelenting government control has powered an explosion of creative play that shows no sign of abating.

It’s a phenomenon that classical artists would have understood and applauded. For them, great art always had a spiritual ‘vitality’ that arose from the interplay between yin and yang: negative and positive, emptiness and fullness, darkness and light. The works in STATE OF PLAY could hardly be more different from the ink scrolls of Chinese tradition, but their liveliness comes from the same electric source. They explore not only the bright side of play—fun and fantasy, caricature and jest—but its shadowy undertow of dreams and longings, seduction and scheming. Some artists use schoolboy scribbles and surreality to make serious comments about the power games of adults; others respond to these games by retreating into childhood memories and imaginings. Their techniques too are playful—experimental, freewheeling, messing with the rules. Contemporary art may not, as some once hoped, make Chinese society free. But, says the critic Lao Li, “it can make the artists free. And for anyone to be free is no small matter.”