Auckland Art Fair: Chinese artist Yuan Keru's strange work

Yuan Keru creates video art by working like she's writing a novel.

While these may look like images from a new science fiction film, they're the strangely beautiful work of Chinese artist Yuan Keru.

She creates her art – in this case a four-screen video installation – by plotting out novels, setting up costumed scenes and getting the performers to semi-improvise scenes and conversations.

You can see her work, and those of other emerging Chinese video and digital artists, at the Auckland Art Fair in a container at the entrance to The Cloud on Auckland's Viaduct. The fair opens to the public on Thursday.

Chinese artist Yuan Keru explores loss of belonging and spiritual thinking in Fleeting Strangers, part of China Import Direct.

Shanghai-based Keru's work Fleeting Strangers is part of the China Import Direct exhibition, a showcase of 10 of the country's best video and digital artists of the past decade.

Curated by the Monumental Culture Company, the artists explore internet culture, rural development and urban change, future biology, identity and gender, and death.

While each of the artists is well-known in China and have often worked in the United States and Europe, this will be the first time any of their work has been seen in New Zealand.

A scene from Fleeting Strangers.

All are born post-1980, and represent the unique social conditions and reflections of the generation born after China's open up and reform policy, and the one-child policy.

This year's art fair features 41 participating galleries from across New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific, Hong Kong, China and Chile.