Auckland Art Gallery

The Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now exhibition

I have an afternoon arrangement, so I have to leave Waiheke fairly smartly on Saturday morning. Luckily there’s coffee at the ferry terminal, so I survive the crossing. This time, I’m on the Fullers boat - it’s quite a bit bigger than the Island Direct one but very busy: it might just be the Saturday morning factor.

I’ve changed locations again - the YMCA up on Pitt Street. It is already a good location, just off Karangahape Road, but soonish it will be opposite a brand new train station - making it very convenient for getting to and from the airport. The hostel itself is pretty good: the woman who checks me in is 100% lovely.

I have an appointment at the Art Gallery: earlier in the week I arranged with a mate from my days as a student to come take a look. I had actually thought I’d see the whole gallery, but after we spend a couple of hours in the Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now exhibit, we are done. It’s totally worth it. According to their website, it’s about how contemporary artists have responded to various “seismic shifts in society” since China opened up in 1978, “transitioning from rural to urban, traditional to modern, and industrial to global powerhouse”.

While I wait for my mate, I try out the onsite café - I would come across the street from my workplace in the late 1980’s for a special meal. It’s a bit more basic these days, but still a relaxing space. As we walk towards the exhibition, we’re quite taken with this. It’s Eternity - Tianlongshan Grottoes Bodhisattva, Winged Victory of Samothrace by Xu Zhen.

Once inside, a disappointment. Hello, also by Xu Zhen is a robotic sculpture which echoes Greek colums. Unfortunately it is not working when we are here, so we don’t see it in action (I have subsequently seen videos - it does writhe about, albeit slowly).

I’m quite intrigued by a sequence of videos. The first is a chap (Li Bunyuan) going about his daily ablutions, on the Beijing Subway. He shaves, he brushes his teeth, he washes his face. Apparently, rather than going wild, the crowd let him be.

The next two have similar themes - the first answers the question of how you add a meter to the top of a hill, when you only have humans. We see them remove all their clothes, then get weighed (not sure why), prior to assembling themselves in a pile. Zhang Huan is said to have developed a “radical performance practice that tested physical and psychological limits”: I might have enjoyed watching the video but there’s no way in hell I’d participate in such an activity!

His other work here is a little easier - both to perform (if that’s the right word) and on the sensibilities: it’s just raising the water level in a pond by adding people. The man with a child on his shoulders is the artist himself: he has described this activity as “an action of no avail” i.e. deliberately pointless.

This is Pet (Blue) by West Mongolian artist Nabuqi - there’s quite a description, which I interpret as saying that the work explores the tension between artifice and authenticity. I just like the wee tea house on top: it’s not what you’d expect on a pet, whatever the colour.

I spend quite a lot of time with the First Intellectual (Yang Fudong), trying to work out my reaction to it. He’s obviously confused, I don’t understand the brick or the blood - he doesn’t seem happy with modern, commercial life. Next up, I’m sneaking you in to one of my favourite pieces - impossible to properly capture in a photo, as there is constant movement, including an exploding airship (this has to be pointed out to me by my mate). The work is just so intricate! I get so caught up in it, I forget to get a photo of the description, so have no idea who the artist is.

It’s just brilliant! The next photos are of various pieces I note as I walk around, without seeing them as outstanding. I don’t know who the first one is by. The second is three artworks called Femme Fatale,by Cao Yu - they’re actually men, relieving themselves, the idea being that in the settings, they’re not exactly ubermensch. Last is Compromise, by Wang Ziquan.

Here’s another work I like so very much, I again fail to find out who the artist is.

I only know about the spere - it’s by Zhou Zhou, Water Drop Meets Ant Man - it is inspired by the scholar’s rock (Gongshi) from the Song Dynasty but made modern. The description says it’s a looping treadmill to give “an image of contemporary urban life caught in suffocating repitition”. The photos beside it, they are the stories of hundreds of people displaced. The lattice was actually put in the all for this specific exhibition, to give us glimpses of various pieces as we walk around, re-contextualising them.

Last up are two pieces that have us bewildered, because they look like nothing’s going on.

It turns out that if you stand in a particular spot in the room, more becomes visible - although my phone doesn’t manage to get much of a picture of the first one. It also turns out that my phone sees a little more than I do, because until I move to the right spot, I only see the matrix in the second picture - not the face that emerges when I move.

There’s one artwork I don’t get a photo of - it’s several screens, most showing an image, but the central screen is just fuzz. I actually have to ask - is the screen not working, or is that the art? It’s the latter - something about how dependence on modern tech for communication and connection and how it can fail us.

It’s taken a couple of hours to get round this lot and we’re both a little in need of a rest: luckily my mate is a member, so we can retire to the member’s lounge for a cup of tea. It’s full of students when we arrive but we’re the last to leave, right on closing time - much more relaxing than when full, although I had hoped we’d get more than a do it yourself tea.

Cheers!