The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present the work of Geng Jianyi, Huang Ran and Zhang Peili as part of the city-wide project Yellow Signal: New Media in China. Initiated by Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, this series of exhibitions and programs is the first comprehensive presentation of contemporary Chinese new media and video art in Canada. It showcases a selection of leading new media works by internationally acclaimed Chinese artists.

This project is compelling for its portrayal of current political circumstances faced by many artists in China. “Yellow Signal is a metaphor for the communal state of ambiguity in Asian countries,” explains Zheng Shengtian, BC-based artist, curator and internationally recognized scholar and expert on contemporary Chinese art. He further explains, “Yellow Signal is about limitation and possibility, choice and chance, confusion and self-confidence. Feelings that many Asian artists experience, but that artists everywhere may also relate to in their creative practice.”

Yellow Signal: New Media in China is initiated by Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Zheng Shengtian, in collaboration with Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Pacific Cinémathèque, Republic Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

We thank Walter C. Koerner Library at the University of British Columbia for participating in this exhibition.

A special issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Asian Art will accompany the project Yellow Signal: New Media in China. It will include images of the works in the exhibitions, essays, and interviews by Daina Augaitus, Britta Erickson, Diana Freundl, Gao Shiming, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Barbara London, Karen Smith and Zheng Shengtian.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of JNBY Art Projects, the Canada Council for the Arts and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.