Last weekend, Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Curated by Hutch Wilco, the exhibition is the first major survey of Chinese contemporary art to be shown in Aotearoa. Split into four connected themes, and showing 67 works by 42 artists and collectives, Forever Tomorrow traverses through four decades of accelerated major transformation in China, examining the experiences of artists from China’s Reform and opening up in 1978 to the present day. The first theme, Stones From Other Mountains, explores artists' experiments with the body as action, the instability of language, and the capacity of photography, performance, and moving image to propose realities post-Reform. In the second, People Mountain People Sea, artists are seen turning their attention to the ground beneath their feet: connecting with the land amongst the changing landscapes around them and a period of mass migration to China’s cities. The third, Tender Revolutions, looks inward to private lives, attitudes towards intimacy and sexuality, and personal expression. And the fourth and final, In the Clouded Realms, sees artists addressing the architecture of the internet and the behaviours it elicits, navigating the rapidly developing digital era. Merging China’s history and the lived experiences of these artists, the works in Forever Tomorrow seek to subvert the idea of China as exceptional, proposing, rather, a shared global experience, that of living in a state of forever tomorrow. Sof caught up with curator of the show, Hutch Wilco, about Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now and his curatorial process.
