Rotterdam Shows Art, Architecture, Design and Visual Culture from Today's China

A modern China seems to be on the ascendant.

Advertising and propaganda promise every citizen a rich life, a private apartment, a car and one child in a modern metropolis.

After decades of living under stringently imposed rules, people are now sensing the chance to work together to build a modern, economically vibrant China, one that offers scope for individualistic lifestyles and personal ambition.

This transformation is being shaped entirely to a Western model.

Now a number of Chinese artists and designers are raising critical questions about the course of change.

The Netherlands Architecture Institute, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Nederlands fotomuseum have joined forces to stage a penetrating interdisciplinary overview of contemporary Chinese art, architecture, urban design and visual culture, which will offer space for this critical dissent.

What is Chinese architecture now?

Can we learn something from the huge, breakneck changes taking place in what is almost the world's largest country?

It is questions like these that are guiding the content of the exhibition.

New cities with populations in the millions are rising as from nothing, and existing towns seem transformed overnight into jungles of anonymous office and apartment