Born into a Chinese generation that grew up amidst an economic revolution, Xiong Lijun firmly belongs to an age seeping with consumerism. In her lifetime China has undergone an economic transformation and a resulting rapid increase in personal wealth, the years 1978 to 1998 seeing a phenomenal twenty fold increase in GDP. Along with which came the introduction of televisions, computers, the internet, fashion magazines, commercial advertising and the introduction of the one child policy; exposure to the outside world which combined with the expendable income of the one child family, resulted in the evolution of a booming youth culture heavily influenced by a western model. Since the 1970s there has become readily available a mass selection of fashionable and affordable clothes, a wide selection of western and local music, movies, video games, and increased access to foreign media. Open romantic relationships have become acceptable as increasingly has pre-marital sex, although still perhaps seen as a taboo subject. In general, the lives of young people in China today would be unrecognisable to their equivalents thirty years ago. This is the context in which Xiong Lijun creates her work, with everything in her paintings reflecting her contemporary existence. She is one of the most prominent and distinctive artists to emerge from her generation, her dynamic and intensely vibrant paintings expressing the twenty-first century voice of China's urban youth. Her neon, cartoon like oil and acrylic paintings are a visual bombardment where figures dance, sing or throw themselves into dramatic poses influenced by fashion photography. Fluorescent flashes of pink, yellow, green and blue forcibly grab our attention; cartoon like colours that were never previously thought to belong in a gallery space but which are here being used with a new finesse and purpose. Xiong attended the Sichuan Art Academy in Chongqing, where like all Chinese art students of her generation, she received a strictly traditional artistic education that engendered her technically brilliant painting style. The problems with such a confined training soon became apparent however when after her graduation Xiong found herself in a state of confusion after abandoning the taught traditional style. She experimented with impressionism for a short period, as did many of her peers but soon recognised that these works bore no relation to her personal life, nor the world in which she lived. She therefore began to turn to the imagery of her every day existence, finding inspiration in fashion magazines, MTV, cartoons, and commercial advertising; all of those things that had pervaded China relatively recently and which make up a thriving youth culture. In the true style of the pop artist Xiong presents us with a visual record of the mass produced imagery that has proliferated through recent years and elevates this visual language to the status of fine art. She presents us with a pop culture that was nonexistent thirty years ago, when tightly controlled visual imagery was almost solely politically based. Therefore, implicit in her iconography of the new commercialist age is a kind of celebration; a sense of the relative freedom that today's youth have compared to their parent's generation. A major facet of Chinese contemporary mass imagery is cartoon; Xiong Lijun's style bearing testimony to the phenomenon that is animation in modern society. Her decision to paint in this manner is also largely based upon her desire to make art relevant to a wider audience, an aim which she successfully achieves. Cartoon gained massive popularity throughout the 90s in China, after a long period of non existence under Maoist rule. When access to the art form was once again allowed through the channels of international media, Japanese and American styles become hugely influential; in the form of comic books, animated cartoons and computer games, millions of young people fell in love with a host of characters, even becoming personifications of them in cosplay, the Japanese phenomenon that started in the late 80s. Xiong's great enthusiasm for cosplay and all kinds of cartoon expresses itself in the large bright eyes, oversized heads, long thin bodies and costumes of her characters. They are forms which may be cartoon in their colouration and style but in many other aspects of Xiong's paintings; the objects, detailing, reflections and shadows we see the realism of traditional fine arts. Into these realist details the artist incorporates the cartoon so smoothly however, that the overall effect is mesmerizing and we see that unlike, for example, Litchenstein, who elevated cartoon to the status of fine art, Xiong assimilates it into fine art so that it actually becomes a hybrid art form. The enthusiastic colours and lively forms in Xiong Lijun's works make it easy to recognise them as representations of China's inspired urban youth and indeed, this is partly true. However, lurking behind the brightness of the neon there is something more complex, something that the artist may not have even consciously implied. In observing Xiong's works we realise that this is not in fact the reality of China's modern youth, but what scores of them crave; the youth, beauty and material possessions that signify a certain persona and status in society. In Xiong's paintings we are drowned in ideals of image and material gain as she presents us with what is essentially a fantasy. Contributing to this is the cartoon aspect of the work, as the art form is in itself an illusion; a fictitious world where all that is impossible or unattainable in real life can be represented. Xiong admits that she paints the physical attributes, and one can assume, the material possessions that she desires in her life and in doing so she highlights the extent to which her generation has been conditioned by extensive advertising and media pressure. She demonstrates an attitude which is of course not limited to China, but one which has been seized upon relatively recently with furious enthusiasm in Xiong's native land. Continually picking up inspiration from sources as diverse as supermarkets, designer stores or MTV shows, Xiong Lijun incorporates the objects and images that she finds into the arena of her fantasy world. What we see may be a positive hope for the future but it is also a reflection of the new generation of material pressure that China's youth feel themselves under today; a very different pressure to the political devotion required of yesteryear, but one which is by no means less forceful.