“Chinese artist”: put those two words together and you get a virtual 　　“open sesame” for biennales, art galleries and private collections. 　　Though they were known only to a happy few early on, word of the 　　discovery of the Chinese avant-gardes from the 80s soon spread. 　　Being an artist in China today can be very lucrative indeed… as long 　　as you hopped on the bandwagon at the right time. For trends change 　　in the blink of an eye. This film gets inside an art system as well as 　　penetrating Chinese creators’ dual identities: both predatory and 　　exotic. Both “tiger” and “panda”. 　　Spanning China’s eras and profound mutations over the last two 　　decades, artists and critics, curators and gallery owners talk about the 　　different currents that left an impression: the “political-pop” paintings 　　of the 80s that thumbed their noses at the recent political past, the 　　outrageous caricatures of Chinese society produced by adepts of 　　“cynical realism,” performance art bordering on terrorism, then the 　　multicultural 00s, steeped in manga culture, video art, internet, and 　　more. 　　From Suzhou Creek in Shanghai and Factory 798 in Beijing, the two 　　main showcases for contemporary Chinese art, the film plunges into 　　the buried memories of the earliest hippie-artist villages in the 90s, up 　　to the first wave of demolition… 　　The choice of a Franco-Chinese co-direction has quickly become selfevident. 　　A dual gaze made all the more valuable if we wish to bring 　　into clear focus the confrontation of two imaginary worlds: the West 　　that the Chinese long for and the East that we Westerners fantasize. 　　In so doing, the film hopes to scramble our western gaze, which 　　seems to be stuck on a China we believe to be gung-ho and 　　productive, in a state of fecund, inspired flux… yet which can not live 　　up to this idealized portrait. More than ever, artists are questioning 　　their deepest identity and what they are to become. What is the price 　　to pay to preserve art’s independence? What does it mean to be an 　　artist in today’s China? Or to be Chinese when you decide to be an 　　artist?