For those of you more interested in avant-garde art, Beijing also has much to offer. The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) has opened a New Year exhibition. Named "On-and-Off", it focuses on the young artists in China. Fifty promising individuals and their works were chosen.

Most artists featured in this exhibition were born after 1975. The title "On-and-Off" refers to the generation's unique position as social narrators of contemporary China. It's the virtual toggle of the internet and modern electronic gadgets. It's also a metaphor for constantly switching one's identity to adjust to different social environments in the open-policy China, an era beset by the confrontation between old and new ideologies.

UCCA collaborated with two co-curators. They spent more than one year visiting artists all over China, and examining their full portfolios before archiving.

Bao Dong, co-curator of "On/Off", said, "We are in the same age range of these artists, so we are not making judgments. We only chose them based on our aesthetics. The result turned out to be full of surprises. We had seen their works, but we never expected what it would be like if we put them together. Some pieces are their creators' first large-scale works, because they never had any financial support until this time. Their bold attempts are dynamic."

Visitors will be surprised to see how the atmosphere in the gallery is shaped by the works. Paintings, short films, animation, installation pieces, architecture, even music videos find themselves a spot.

Philip Tinari, director of UCCA, Beijing, said, "We're really most interested in showing the public the best things that are coming out of the contemporary Chinese art scene at this time. Of course as an institution with a public profile, and an exhibition that has anticipated viewership of a few hundred thousand people, this can help the career of artists that participated."

The exhibition was produced with excellent curatorship and extensive academic research. It showcases the wide range and high calibre of work being made in China today, and it's quite possible that some of these artworks will become pivotal to the future of the Chinese art scene.

It is a collective presentation of a younger generation of artists in China, and the forms are not limited. Most of the artists were born and bred during the open-up and reform era, their works are heavily influenced by the new economy, new social status, and new technologies, and the process of creating them is their ways of seeing the world.

(CNTV.cn January 22, 2013)