Auckland Art Gallery Exhibition Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now Explores Brings Ai Weiwei & Xu Zhen To NZ
The contemporary Chinese art on display in Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now is spellbinding, thought-provoking and technically brilliant, writes Ginny Fisher.
Behind closed doors at Auckland Art Gallery, a few weeks before Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now is due to open its doors, there’s a hive of activity on the gallery floor – crates are sprawled open, electricians are busy powering up light boxes and monitors, while specialist builders erect a complex automated sculpture.
Mastermind of the exhibition and curator, Hutch Wilco, has spent the past three years pulling this together, and he seems surprisingly collected amid the chaos. He admits, however, that the logistics of moving the larger sculptures across oceans by ship have been a challenge, particularly with the current fuel crisis.
“I wasn’t certain we’d get every artwork here in time, but we did it,” he says, pointing to the 7m-high, 3-tonne carved stone sculpture by Xu Zhen towering in the atrium foyer; it was jimmied through the back doors with mere inches to spare, he says.
Wilco was based in Shanghai for almost a decade, and has a background in curation, arts writing and exhibition development across China. His time in Shanghai honed his eye for post-1980s Chinese art, which he has transformed into this exciting new exhibition that includes playful sculpture, mesmerising painting and plenty of eye-catching moving image and multimedia works.
“I dreamed up the exhibition when I moved back to New Zealand during the Covid lockdown. I was living downtown, and walking through the streets, I’d hear people speaking Chinese. I’d catch the whiff of dumplings, and it kind of felt like being back in Shanghai.”
It was obvious to him, with the increasing population of Chinese people in New Zealand – around 260,000 – there’d be keen interest in a survey of Chinese contemporary art; an area of the art market that also happens to be growing at speed and garnering the attention of art collectors.
“Judith Neilson, the Sydney art collector, for example, realised back in the early 2000s there was something amazing going on in China,” says Wilco.
Neilson, a South African-born billionaire philanthropist who founded the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney in 2009, has since reportedly amassed the world’s largest collection of Chinese Contemporary Art. Of her 5000-piece collection, 4000 are of Chinese origin. Fifteen of her works are on loan and on display at this exhibition, including a work by photographer Pixy Liao, who has just been awarded the prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, film and video.
Her eye for art is instinctual, so why Chinese art? Neilson is pragmatic.
“China has more artists than any other country, so you can see the best right down to the ordinary. The amount of art you are exposed to educates you more than any university could, as you can easily compare like works and themes, the most competent are clearly visible.
“Instant gratification is how I collect, I am not interested in names or meaning and I don’t necessarily return to the same artist unless the work resonates.”
Here’s looking at you
China’s art history is emblazoned with the colours of communism. The country’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was spearheaded by communist leader Chairman Mao, who wanted to create a new visual culture that celebrated workers, soldiers, industrial progress and of course his own popularity. It was a time when artists were commissioned to make saccharine posters extolling the virtues of the collective workforce – paintings were often based on the Soviet model – with groupings of figures with hands raised, often holding Mao’s little red book, “Unite for Greater Victory!”. Artists were another tool in the state’s kit – their job was to create propaganda for the cause.
Fast forward to 1978. After Mao Zedong’s death a few years earlier, new leader Deng Xiaoping was faced with transforming a limping Chinese economy. He had no choice but to shift the focus from radical communist ideology to economic development and that meant opening up the West to bolster the economy.
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now focuses on this period. It was game on for artists. Finally, they could travel abroad, read art magazines and garner ideas from outside China in terms of materials and subject matter.
Artists widened their practice.
“The new wave of art in China, 1978-1985, launched more than 1000 offshoot movements in art from all areas of the creative spectrum, from performance, photography to sculpture,” says Wilco.
Art schools and museums began to bloom. Many artists took this as an opportunity to move abroad, including the now-famous Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, who went to New York and produced work that challenged the Chinese Government’s censorship laws and control of the arts.
Weiwei is still at it and has quite the nomadic life with studios across the globe – often creating huge works that comment on societal problems and the weight of what it is to be human.
His work Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, on show in Auckland, is a series of still photographs in which Weiwei drops and smashes a 2000-year-old ceremonial urn; an artefact not only of considerable monetary value, but also symbolic and cultural worth. Through this work, he questions how and who gets to create cultural value.
In a recent interview for Forbes, Weiwei cheekily questioned the role of art in society: “Art is just about making trouble, but not big troubles. The art world is too fragile if you make big troubles, just small ones. So, I don’t really create artworks; I just make little troubles.”
But by 1989, trouble was rearing its head in China. The wave of avant-garde artists who launched the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989 – one of the most significant exhibitions in the history of Chinese contemporary art – were bold and ready to show the nation their new direction.
In a shock move, just before the show opened, the state gave the thumbs down to any performance art as it was considered too risque. On the day of the opening, however, one miffed and daring artist, Xiau-Lu, went ahead with her performance; pulling a gun from her pocket, she dramatically shot her own artwork twice, then handed her weapon to her partner and fled. Eventually, she handed herself in and served five days in jail; as a result, the exhibition was temporarily shut down.
Four months later, many of the exhibiting artists were involved in the national protests questioning democracy and government corruption at Tiananmen Square.
The resulting bloodshed and mass arrests sent shock waves around the world.
“By this point, the government is deeply afraid of contemporary art,” Wilco explains.
It was shut-up-shop time for the art world. Galleries closed their doors. Artists went underground – showing work in private apartments became a workaround for censorship issues.
But by the late 90s, the art world freed up again (the 2000 Shanghai Biennale signalled this shift) and for the first time international artists were allowed to exhibit in China.
Along came the second wave of contemporary art in the midst of rapid industrialisation and the urban drift of more than 400 million people to Chinese cities, explains Wilco.
Urban drift had a devastating impact on the rural landscape; villages were flattened and plastic waste besieged the nation – the state had recently become a member of the World Trade Organisation and had started importing waste – which led to illegal landfills across the country.
The artist Guo Jian witnessed this firsthand. In his cinematic photographs of rubbish-filled wastelands, the smoggy, apocalyptic scenes look like sombre still lifes of unsettling dystopian worlds.
Guo Jian, now Sydney-based, says there has been some improvement on the environmental front, but problems remain.
“The people I photographed were cautious but also curious; their villages were surrounded by rubbish and under demolition. I insisted I would report their concerns. I think art can raise awareness, but real change needs policy and public action.
“Pointing out issues as an artist is a basic duty, though not every artist must do this,” says Jian with distinct diplomacy.
The mid 1990s saw a flurry of high-rise developments and a consequential real estate boom that demanded longer working hours. Migrants left their families and far-flung provinces to work in the city, further eroding traditional ways of life.
“The welfare system (or Hukou) linked workers back to their provinces, so in the city labourers had no access to healthcare or schooling; that’s why they had to leave their wives and children behind,” Wilco explains.
An artwork that encapsulates the zeitgeist is “Infinite Landscape” by Yang Yongliang. From afar, the image appears like a fantastical, traditional landscape from the Song Dynasty, a period known for monumental landscape paintings that explore the balance between nature and humanity. On closer inspection, we see a moving video work made up from 20,000 photographs and video layers; tiny people go about their day, gondolas and skyscrapers teeter over the cavernous landscape, and a smoggy haze layers the scene. The artist is asking, what becomes of cultural memory when nature is supplanted by infrastructure? Can beauty and the excesses of modern society co-exist?
The art of quietly speaking
Astonishingly, a new art museum opens in China every day and a half, says Wilco.
There is still, however, only one public institution that shows contemporary art (The Powerstation of Art Shanghai).
“Contemporary artists must practice the art of quietly speaking, and they have become clever at getting around censorship – they might gravitate towards private viewings or if there’s nudity, the artist might place Post-it notes over the genitals – this process in itself almost becomes creative leverage.”
On the bright side, the growth in art infrastructure is frequently funded at the provincial government level to create a rich art ecology. For example, the transformation of dilapidated chicken factory buildings on Chongming Island into an art park by Xu Zhen, the artist who created the huge sculpture Eternity, currently on show in the Auckland Art Gallery’s Atrium.
“Without the official level supporting this infrastructure, making work at scale would be exceedingly difficult,” says Wilco.
Fierce competition for art education is real.
“When you have over 200,000 students applying for one art department, the artists who make it through have skills deeply rooted in technical ability.”
And artists in China are unafraid to push their brand. Many have trademarked their names – like XU ZHEN®.
“Chinese artists are business people, they have merch and podcasts – they are hungry to make a good living.”
Future imperfect
“There are a few works in this show that might cross the red line in China,” says Wilco, particularly those that involve nudity or sexual references.
Censorship and the strict regulation of the internet by the “great firewall” are aspects of artistic life that Chinese artists continue to grapple with. While the changing face of acceptable societal norms, including public displays of affection, nudity and the broadening of acceptance of differing sexual orientations and definitions, also provides material for delicate exploration.
But artists are often on their tippy toes.
“The further south you go, where it’s more conservative, the harder it is for artists to show works that might be sensitive,” says Wilco.
“And while the firewall limits online freedoms, it also creates opportunities for local media and native technologies to thrive. More artists are using technology, but they are returning to traditional Chinese stories through modern applications, rather than producing work that might appeal directly to the West; they are telling their own stories.”
Lu Pingyuan, for example, uses artificial intelligence image-making programs to create imagery for his works that explore the algorithm’s power of decision-making and ideas surrounding divine deities in Chinese mythology.
“I use passages from stories I make up as the basis for conversations with AI. This process is sometimes abstract, involving several software programs processing images and text. In the end, I take the resulting images and reassemble them using image-editing software and collage and composition, until I finally arrive at an image of a deity that I can render through handmade techniques such as paper cutting, scissor cutting, and engraved paper cutting. This process involves a high degree of chance: even when you provide the same request, the results can be completely different.”
For Pingyuan, being an artist in China continues to provide many possibilities for exploration.
“What I love most about being an artist is that I can earnestly spend time on everything uncertain and unknown.”
Although many Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei and Sydney-based Guo Jian remain abroad, they continue to explore the tensions that exist in all societies.
Guo Jian remains in Australia because of its openness and multiculturalism, but still sees cracks in society.
“As a former soldier and member of a Chinese minority group, and now a member of an Australian minority group, the co-existence and clash between Australia’s inclusiveness and its conservative cultural base are themes I continue to explore,” says Jian.
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now opens at Toi Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery on May 2 and runs until August 23.
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