FUTURE LIFE HANDBOOK
REDTORY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART WORKSHOP | YOUNG ARTISTS PROGRAMME
Artists:Aaajiao, Amir Fattal, Law Yuk-mui, Mariana Hahn, Miao Ying, Zijie
Academic Director: Dong Bingfeng
Curator: Rachel Rits-Volloch
Duration:2017.12.16-2018.05.07
Venue:RMCA WORKSHOP
Organizer:RMCA
In collaboration with:MOMENTUM / Germany Consulate in Guangzhou
Future Life Handbook. We would all like to have one of these – a guide on how to keep going in troubling times. As information moves faster and faster, in our race to keep up with it, we are often too busy with the now to look to the future. As the struggle continues between preserving history and rewriting it to fit a new script, it is also becoming ever harder to tell the difference between real and fake news. And, if both our past and our present are continuously reimagined, how are we to forecast our futures? Universal to all of us living in these mediated times, the ubiquity of such issues brings us much closer together.
Artists ‘speaking’ through the autonomous voices of visual languages, translate the world to us in different, unbounded ways. This exhibition brings together the work of six young artists and two curators from China and Berlin. It is designed as a dialogue, as an exchange and elaboration of different perspectives that reflect upon our current moment through a study of the past and a view towards the future.
Young Artists Programme
It is only since the end of the 1970s that contemporary art has become established in China. First, in the mid-1980s, it was characterized by ‘The New Wave’ then, in the 1990s and after, by the ‘New Cynicism’ and ‘Experimental Art,’ but the challenges facing art today demand a radically different approach. Global flows of capital, and the burgeoning of transnational networks and social media have brought together, and transformed, the cultural and political context. A new generation of artists in China, and elsewhere, is facing, and digesting, the effects of this transformation.
This has made an impact on how art is made and thought about. Increasingly, art works adopt the form and discipline of archives as they confront memory and the past from different contemporary points of view, and even the conventions and boundaries of the art exhibition itself are gradually being eroded as art and life interpenetrate in new, unexpected ways. For the art of today, museums take on the role more of laboratories as the concerns of artists, curators, designers, architects, intellectuals and the public begin to converge.
Speakers: Rachel Rits-Volloch / Dong Bingfeng / Aaajiao / Mariana Hahn / Zijie
Host: Vivienne Chow
Date: 2017.12.16
Venue: Academic Hall, Hall 1, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA)
▲Curator: Rachel Rits-Volloch
▲Academic Director: Dong Bingfeng
▲Opening Performance by Marianan Hahn