Recent years have seen a surge in the appearance of sculptures in parks, streets and squares in Chinese cities. Of varying levels, those sculptures are the first impression of public art in a lot of people's minds, yet the word "public art" is still puzzling for ordinary people.

What is public art? How can public art be really appreciated by common people? And is there a different view of it, besides the conventional model of the city sculpture?
These are big questions on the desk of many Chinese artists and city authorities.

On July 15, the Public Art Center inside the Third Pole Creative Zone in uptown Beijing made its debut exhibition. It can be seen as an experiment through which the organizer, the Public Art Center Committee, tries to answer these questions.

It can barely be called a "centre." It has neither independent space nor doors or walls.

The exhibits are not displayed together in a hall, but instead, each of them greets the visitors separately on different floors of the Creative Zone, which is a modern shopping mall that includes book stores, restaurants, gyms and beauty parlours.

People at every entrance of the building will notice a couple of stone lions, which are frequently seen as essential features of grand Chinese architecture as well as the symbol of royalty and dignity in traditional culture.

Yet in the video works of Beijing artist Wang Gongxin entitled "Always Welcome," the lion images on the TV screen continuously say "Hello" to entering customers.
Computer technology adds cartoon-like special effects to images of the lions that make their eyes roll and legs move.

As one of the earliest Chinese artists creating video-works, Wang expresses his feelings about daily life, usually in a humorous way.

Chen Shaoxiong, another pioneering video artist from Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, displays a three-minute video entitled, "The City in Ink and Water."

He spent two years taking photos of the hustle-and-bustle of Guangzhou, changed these pictures into ink-and-water paintings and showed them in videotapes dubbed with recordings of daily-life sounds.

Based on his memories, Chen presents a daydream of the metropolitan life.

Also on show are multi-media works by Zhou Xiaohu, Qiu Anxiong of Shanghai and Hung Tung-Lu from Taiwan. Their creations tap deep inside modern people and mirror the exhaustions and lost feelings of humans in a mass-produced world.

The exhibition is a message from organizers that public art doesn't need to be observed or understood with distance, reverence and seriousness. Public art should come across naturally in any public place and evoke emotion.

(China Daily July 27, 2006)