老虎与熊猫 Tigers and Pandas

“Chinese artist”: put those two words together and you get a virtual
　　“open sesame” for biennales, art galleries and private collections.
　　Though they were known only to a happy few early on, word of the
　　discovery of the Chinese avant-gardes from the 80s soon spread.
　　Being an artist in China today can be very lucrative indeed… as long
　　as you hopped on the bandwagon at the right time. For trends change
　　in the blink of an eye. This film gets inside an art system as well as
　　penetrating Chinese creators’ dual identities: both predatory and
　　exotic. Both “tiger” and “panda”.
　　Spanning China’s eras and profound mutations over the last two
　　decades, artists and critics, curators and gallery owners talk about the
　　different currents that left an impression: the “political-pop” paintings
　　of the 80s that thumbed their noses at the recent political past, the
　　outrageous caricatures of Chinese society produced by adepts of
　　“cynical realism,” performance art bordering on terrorism, then the
　　multicultural 00s, steeped in manga culture, video art, internet, and
　　more.
　　From Suzhou Creek in Shanghai and Factory 798 in Beijing, the two
　　main showcases for contemporary Chinese art, the film plunges into
　　the buried memories of the earliest hippie-artist villages in the 90s, up
　　to the first wave of demolition…
　　The choice of a Franco-Chinese co-direction has quickly become selfevident.
　　A dual gaze made all the more valuable if we wish to bring
　　into clear focus the confrontation of two imaginary worlds: the West
　　that the Chinese long for and the East that we Westerners fantasize.
　　In so doing, the film hopes to scramble our western gaze, which
　　seems to be stuck on a China we believe to be gung-ho and
　　productive, in a state of fecund, inspired flux… yet which can not live
　　up to this idealized portrait. More than ever, artists are questioning