As part of Reel China: Chinese New Documentary Film Festival, Chambers Fine Art will be showing a series of eleven documentary films from 15 to 20 May, 2001. The festival organizer, R.E.C. Foundation Inc., has selected documentaries made in the last decade by artists from mainland China on a wide variety of topics, ranging from changes in artistic policy to family planning, from minority matters to the legal system.

The films vividly and faithfully portray the transformations of China during the last hundred years, with an emphasis on the last two decades after China adopted open-door policies. Filmed in many areas of China, these documentaries range in territory from its capital city Beijing to its most southwest province Yunnan, from the Yangtse River at the heart of China to its remote Tibetan provinces. No matter where the stories take place, they provide an unusually close look at ordinary Chinese people, whose lives are easily overlooked.

Kubert Leung analyzes paintings produced from 1966 to 1976 in Art in the Cultural Revolution, revealing Mao's strategy of using art for political purposes. Ten years later, a new generation of Chinese artists expressed their anxiety and frustrations in the newest art form in the contemporary Chinese art world - Performance Art, as documented in Chinese Avant-Garde Performance Art from 1986 to 2000. Filmed in widely dispersed parts of China, Jiang Yue's A River Stilled explores the fatal change in a couple's life while building the hydraulic station at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse River, and Zhu Xiaoqing's 20 Wei Hai Road, reflects the gradual changes in the People's Square in Shanghai over the last century. Romantic Lake and Baka Village reveal the mysterious lives of those who follow their ancestor's traditional living styles in isolated areas of China. The conflicts and struggles occasioned by their encounters with "modernity" and "civilization," expose questions of preservation and renovation.

The simple, straightforward languages used in these documentary films provide a glimpse into modern China through the eyes of "ordinary people" (lao baixing), and show the wide variety of lifestyles and problems that China is facing during its massive economical, political and cultural transitions.