This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Big-Tail Elephant' at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland, from September to October 1998. Big-Tail Elephant is an artist group from Guangzhou composed of Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui and Xu Tan. The exhibition is their first appearance as a group outside of China. 'The tremendous upheaval in China, reflecting the culture shock provoked by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, represents the core theme for this group’s artistic projects. Their work deals with the cultural, intellectual, social and political schisms in present day China. To this end, the group resorts in the main to the vocabulary of "western" art. And — as much from an Asiatic point of view as from that of the Western world — they contrive to render the familiar foreign, and the alien trustworthy. Above all, the group seeks to instill confusion between the public and private realms, to doctor "normal" size ratios, and to correlate art with life. In other words, to use all possible means (but preferably those with which we are most familiar) for purposes of destabilization.' —Bernhard Fibicher

Artists' biographies are provided.