A masterpiece from Gillian Carson,Photo from book.sina.com.cn

When wormwood shrubs were pulled out from the wild and replanted in the centre of Today Art Museum's exhibition hall, innovative art was born.

Using a patch of loess as the base, the uneven yellowish green wormwood towers over art viewers. The wormwood forest, a common sight in nature, is shocking, odd and out of place in the museum hall full of other art works. The scene, which seems withered and desolate, contains a kind of primitive, natural and somewhat decadent strength.

This is a work of the ongoing exhibition, entitled Post Nora. It features the work of 14 women artists from China and Norway.

Paintings, sculptures, installations and video works, from seven Chinese and seven Norwegian artists, are gathered to explore the meaning of "post Nora."

What happened to Nora after she ran away from home in Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's world-famous play A Doll's House? For the modern women and the participating artists, the concept of self-possession marks the post-Nora age with two implications: one refers to the fact that women express their ideas about the world with specific inner power rather than shouting and crying; the other to the fact that women participate in the public life with wisdom rather than presenting their naked bodies.

The contemporary artists are sensitive and predictive, challenging the limits of their minds, bodies and traditional values. And the extent of women artists' stepping out of the box has never been left to the opposite sex.

Peng Yu's video work shows the scene of steam-filling spaces to transmit the theme of "Incomplete Possibility"; Bodil Furu's picture series "12 Studies in Shit" examines waste, urging the public to learn about the past and environmental protection; Ingrid Book and Carina Heden's photographs find Nora in officers' training courses studying how to handle a Leopard tank; and Sun Furong's work, an installation with rolls of badly damaged Western suits lining in queues, expresses the idea of the indefinite growth of human nature's selfishness and over-indulgence.

Aside from the wormwood display, another large-scale work is Gillian Carson's sculpture called "Emotional Hygiene." Standing up to the ceiling of the hall, the abstract image is composed of discarded newspaper and sticky tape.

"The developed media and sky-news which the press imposes on ordinary people have caused an emotional response from us," said 46-year-old Carson. "They sell the news, neglecting the pains of their readers. This installation pours my bad feelings out."

For the artist, this work displays a process of identification and the administration of an inherited bulk of seemingly paralysed emotional response and describes the development of humans' relationships with their environment.

"The women artists of the two nations are based on totally different social situation," said Wang Baoju, deputy director of the Today Art Museum. "Chinese women artists stress their surviving condition in the broad concept and social context, which their Norwegian peers face with severe spiritual challenge. The same thing is that they should find their position in the modern society, a period of post-Nora."

Time: 9 am-4 pm, at Today Art Msuem, 32 Baiziwan Lu, Chaoyang District.
Tel: 010-5862-1100 ext 142.