BACK STORY / XING DANWEN China's official Great Leap Forward took place in the late '50s, but it is actually occurring now, as China moves at warp speed from communism to capitalism, from isolation to globalization. Xing Danwen has seen it all. She was born in 1967, a year after the advent of the Cultural Revolution. She enrolled at Beijing's newly reopened Central Academy in 1988, a year before the protests and crackdown at Tiananmen Square. During the '90s, the petite artist, whose training was in the Western academic tradition, participated in the artistic ferment of the period. She further broadened her perspective, education and career by traveling and living abroad. "I went through a process to break the boundaries of tradition to become contemporary," Xing says. "Everyone in my generation had to do it according to their experience and fate." The artist has experienced the problems of globalization as well as its perks. She saw her countrymen replace bicycles with pollution-belching cars. She watched them shuck Mao jackets for Gucci knockoffs in a frenzy of consumer mania. This unique set of experiences is the stuff of her art. "All my work is about how modernity shapes today's life," she says. The striking photographs of her "Disconnexion" series (2002-3) at Kiang Gallery exemplify both her themes and her approach. Large-format and often brilliant in color, the photos are bold in form and subtle in content. At first glance, they look like abstractions created through close-ups of everyday objects. One is a tangle of battery chargers, another, a brocade of keyboards. But these images are not artful compositions. They are actual, uncropped close-ups of electronic trash. China, you see, is where our discarded cellphones, video games and computers go to die. Barges dump them in Quangdong province, where migrant workers sort the items and divest them of any recyclable materials. Each village has its niche, hence the single-subject images. "The people work in the most primitive conditions," Xing says. "The trash covers the floors of their huts and extends out into the street. They burn the plastic for copper, and black smoke hangs in the fields. Trash is dumped in the river. It's a polluted, dangerous environment." Icons of the underbelly of globalization, the 42 photos in the series have been exhibited widely, including at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris. One graced the February cover of ArtNews magazine. Xing got her first camera in 1989 and taught herself how to use it. She began with black-and-white street photography. Her first pictures were of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in the months before the army tanks took it over, a terrifying experience she likens to the World Trade Center attacks. Xing abandoned painting after her 1992 graduation because she was living like a nomad, moving four or five times a year. Photography accommodated her lifestyle. "There was no private property," she says. "Everything was state-owned, and it was illegal to rent state property." She became involved in the raucous, transgressive avant-garde scene in Beijing's East Village. During the mid-'90s, she made photos themed around issues of identity and sexuality, including nude self-portraits. Performance artists began asking her to document their performances, and she also documented their lives. This fall, she will publish a selection of those photos in a book titled "A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s." Xing made a living as a photojournalist for Western magazines. By 1998, she felt she was at a crossroads. She needed to decide whether to continue in her business or devote herself to her art. The need to make a decision came to a head when she received grants that would enable her to move to New York and study at the School for Visual Arts. She was afraid she would lose her clients if she went. "It's like tea getting cold," she says. "No one will want it." In the end, she chose to go to New York. Xing decided this two-year period would be a time to bury herself in art. "I thought I would get my head reorganized, gain confidence, become a 21st-century artist," she says. Her master's thesis, "Sleepwalking," an installation about the dislocation of living outside one's culture, is on view in "Strange Planet" at Georgia State University. Living in America helped her to see that the Chinese interpretation of Western life was simplistic. "We take only the worst part of capitalism," she says. "Everything is money. We are so busy consuming, we don't take care of people. People had a safety net under communism. Not now. "Our leaders have short vision, little knowledge. We need younger leaders who have studied abroad who can understand how to build a new system." In the meantime, she continues to make her own commentary on the pitfalls of globalization. One of the themes of her recent series, "Urban Fiction," is the way modern architecture obliterates a sense of place. The architectural models she photographs and manipulates represent actual construction projects in Beijing, but they could be anywhere. That's the point, of course, and it's something you don't have to be Chinese to understand. Which is important to Xing. As she says, "I want to be known as an international, not a Chinese, artist." - Catherine Fox Atlanta Journal-Constitution / 10.21.04