With the explosive growth in the art world in China, the volume of exhibitions has expanded from a handful to thousands. Each year China’s galleries, private and public museums, and art centres together exhibit hundreds of thousands of individual artworks. But how many of them are any good? How many should find their way into a collection, into a museum; into history?

As Seen puts on record a select handful of outstanding artistic achievements: the notable artworks worth remembering.

China’s contemporary art scene has been described by The Economist as ‘a cultural landscape with so few signposts’. A neat and compact guide, As Seen provides an antidote with a collection of signposts that add up to a timely, straight-to-the-point look at forty of remarkable pieces of art.

Karen Smith has been writing about China’s contemporary art scene since the early 1990s. She has lived in China for twenty years during which time she has contributed to numerous international and domestic publications and a wide range of exhibition catalogues, both for individual artists and group exhibitions.

Her personal books include several monographs on China’s leading artists, and the historical compendium Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, which examines the careers of nine founding fathers of China’s new art movement which began in 1985.

In her capacity as curator, Karen Smith regularly works with China's contemporary artists to produce exhibitions in China and abroad.