It's hard to know which is scariest the tattered horde of headless zombies or the creepy white women floating over the overgrown field.

The latest exhibition at Beijing's Today Art Museum may be named after a Henrik Ibsen play, but the atmosphere in the main gallery is more reminiscent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the Village of the Damned.

A work created by Hu Liu featuring a thick field of weeds fills most of the space with a stark white female figure levitating over it. At the far end of the entrance stands Sun Furong's "Western Style Clothes," a group of scarecrows in garish pockmarked outfits. On the wall opposite is a freeze of identical young girls precociously preening over their pregnant friends.

"Post Nora" refers to the family-smashing heroine of Ibsen's proto-feminist play "A Doll's House." And many of the 15 Chinese and Norwegian female artists here articulate women's unsure position in a world where they are independent, yet tied to their femininity.

In Siri Hermansen's blunt "Personal Geography" installation the viewer tiptoes amongst tiny babies under a forest of flags emblazoned with contemporary brand names.

While Gillian Carson presents us with an unwieldy formless mass, precariously balanced on a pushchair.

Yet it seems somehow churlish to restrict the agoraphobia of the 21st century to women alone, and the terror of anonymous crowds, towering buildings packed with identical people or painted faces all shown here is something most Beijingers, or residents of any city for that matter, will be familiar with.

In a more subtle mode Ingrid Book and Carina Heden provide a series of pictures documenting army recruits training in the Scandinavian wilderness. In the final picture we look out of the window of a freshly vacated briefing room over desolate windswept tundra.

Somewhere out there our young scouts are lost in the snow.

The show will run until December 3.

(China Daily November 8, 2006)