Liu Dao, part of the Island6 arts collective, makes its grand debut with a visual art spectacle that toys with various genres and mediums. In this intriguing combination of Pop Art, rice paper with video, and paper cutting with LEDs, the works mirror the complexity of modern day China. Caroline Ward chats to the artists from the respected Shanghai based art collective.

Our exhibition is about… how a shan shui (nature landscape) master painter might feel if he time-travelled into a modern day Chinese city rife with corporate symbolism, plagued with construction and traffic noises, and still filled with traditional ways of life and view of the world.

Our favorite juxtaposition is… art forms from over a thousand years ago like Chinese paper cuttings with the dance steps you might see on MTV beaming out from perfectly calibrated diodes.

Our preparation involves… brainstorming as a collective; writing a screenplay; choreographing a scene; designing a set; filming; morphing the image using software; transferring the information onto computer chips; building a frame and making a rice paper collage to house LED panels or an LCD screen; combined with imagery burned out of wood or metal using a laser engraving machine. And quite a bit more.

LEDs are… like cells in a human body, but instead of sharing identical DNA, they share an identical electrical signal, passed through a chain to come to life.

Contemporary culture is… never fixed, always moving, always changing before your eyes. It is filled with animated characters—some monochrome and monotonous, others chic and flexible. We try to represent all the people you find in contemporary culture in the exhibition.

Spring Floods & Peach Petals runs through Aug 9.

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