Art exhibition offers guide to era's sweeping transformations

The image shows a man unshaven with scraggly hair and draped in denim. With a stack of cloth on his right shoulder, he seems to be haggling with a woman in the middle of a bustling marketplace.

Chinese artist Ren Jian, 64, recalls the scene. It was back in the early 1990s, and he was in the Hanzheng Street central shopping area of Wuhan, Hubei province, buying material that he would later stitch into shirts and other textile renditions incorporating stamplike flags of the world.

"Many things were happening at home and abroad at that time. It was an era of growing consumerism, but it was also not as easy to travel to other countries as it is now. I wanted to express the 'circulation' of ideas and globalization at that stage," Ren says.