DENVER — Do viewers outside of China still expect contemporary Chinese art to “look” Chinese, and what does that even mean? The group exhibition A New Fine Line, on view at Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Center for Visual Art, considers the legacy of thegongbi brush style in a contemporary context. Curator Julie Segraves and creative director Cecily Cullen assembled artworks by nine Chinese artists who employ the gongbi style, a method of ink painting on silk or paper that reaches as far back as the Tang dynasty (618–906 CE). The gongbi brush line is more like a pen line than calligraphic. It is uniformly thick, even wiry, defining boundaries around figures and objects. The medium was the matchmaker between the artists included in this exhibition, but their works are generous with other meanings, from Mao’s utopia and China’s unrelenting economic growth and development, to reflections of the classic gongbi style and subject matter.