Through photography, drawing, painting and video, the artists in "China Now: The Edge of Desire" express a multiplicity of voices that echo the amorphous landscape of today's China and an insatiable appetite for progress. In "The Rising Tide", the narrator explains: "The release of desire is a basic human need." In China, however, this release has acted more like an explosion. The nation's high-speed race towards a future constructed with lofty yet ambiguous notions of "modern" and "utopian" has had a profound impact on visual artists who find it both exhilarating and bewildering. China appears unstoppable. The artists in this unique exhibition are documenting and navigating this historic moment with open eyes and bold language. As they wander through the debris of their history, they are telling an important story inspired by pioneering Chinese artists such as Zhang Huan, Zhang Dali and Wang Qingsong (included in this exhibition). The story is further molded by a global culture which has carried with is capitalism the influence of artists such as Nan Goldin, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans and Andy Warhol among many others. The story is complex and the imagery revelatory. The artists speak of tremendous change, delusions, anxieties, loss, and overwhelming choices. They are facing challenges that we in the Western world have also faced and continue to confront but on a scale that is almost inconceivable. They are at the edge of desire. The edge is a sharp but ambiguous and fluctuating line; desire is cast in yin and yang.

Robert Adanto's film The Rising Tide investigates China through the work of eight contemporary Chinese artists whose work reflects the country's rising influence as an economic, political and cultural force in the global arena. In recent years, Chinese artists have gained international recognition for their powerful works capturing the social and aesthetic confusion created in a rapidly changing society. The Rising Tide explores the work of artists, who comment with intelligence, wit, foreboding and nostalgia. "An often surprising and thought-provoking documentary, the featured artists throw down a collective glove to the rest of the world and declare their Sino-centric Renaissance. The rest of us better make an effort to grasp what their work is about, or get out of the way. An 'eye-opener' in every sense of the word." (Mark Lynch). For more information about the film, please visit www.therisingtidefilm.com.

For further information about the exhibition, please contact Rebecca Heidenberg at rebecca@lhfineart.com or 646-703-4473.