The New Chinese Avant-Garde: Displeasure And Cynicism In Lu Yang's Video Art

China's rapid economic and social transformation in the last two decades has had an immense effect on the nation's youth and impending generation of artists and intellectuals. The country's recent ideological shift has affected the growing "New Generation" of artists to the extent that contemporary avant garde artists are reflecting a clear paradigm shift in sentiment and thematic material via their changing aesthetic. Video art in particular as a fairly new medium in China, has become a clear indicator of this shift where a reworked cynicism has come to ubiquitously remain at the core of digital artistic expression in China. This research will explore the work of Lu Yang, a recently graduated video artist from Shanghai whose work epitomizes the unconventionality of avant garde with an anti-aesthetic that evokes darkness and displeasure. Using Lu Yang's video work as a case study will more importantly exemplify this paramount movement of Chinese contemporary from very specific national interests to existential universalism calling to issues of humanness above all else.