ARTHIST115 Chap.9 Contemporary Chinese Art: Forever Tomorrow
Contemporary Chinese Art: Forever Tomorrow
Week 5 opens the contemporary theme with a lecture on contemporary Chinese art and a tutorial visit to Forever Tomorrow at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The works answer the imperial images of Week 4 by questioning heritage, value and authority.
Xu Zhen's Eternity fuses replicas of the Nike of Samothrace and a Tianlongshan bodhisattva, two sculptures with histories of plunder, and his robotic column "Hello" destabilises the authority of empire. Ai Weiwei drops a 2,000-year-old Han urn to create new meaning from destruction. Pu Yingwei and Shi Xinning paint economic and political history back into the present. Performance carries the most pointed works.
Song Dong, part of Beijing's 1990s apartment art scene after the 1989 crackdown, pours boiling water onto frozen ground, while Zhang Huan's fishpond and mountain performances stage collective effort that deliberately fails. Each work is identified with a precise medium in the tutorial, from gelatin silver prints to robotic sculpture and film, and naming that medium correctly is the first step of any response.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Forever Tomorrow at Auckland Art Gallery
- 02
Plunder and fusion in Xu Zhen's Eternity
- 03
Destruction as meaning in Ai Weiwei's urn
- 04
Economic and political history in painting
- 05
Apartment art and impermanence in Song Dong
- 06
Futility in Zhang Huan's performances
Worked example · free
Analyse a performance that destroys an antique
- 1Identify: Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a 1995 sequence of gelatin silver photographs now in the M+ Sigg Collection in Hong Kong.
- 1Describe the sequence: frame by frame the artist holds, drops and shatters a 2,000-year-old urn.
- 1Interpret: the act of destruction creates new meaning, asking viewers to confront transformation and the destruction of the past.
- 1Contextualise: Ai returned to China in the 1990s during rapid modernisation, and the work dissents against a state that sometimes obliterates its own heritage.
Key terms
- Apartment art
- A 1990s Beijing scene in which artists showed work in their own homes after political crackdowns.
- Readymade
- An ordinary object presented as art, such as Duchamp's Fountain, often seen as the start of conceptual art.
- Conceptual art
- Art in which the idea or question takes priority over a crafted object.
- Repatriation
- The return of an object to its place of origin, which Greece seeks for the Nike of Samothrace.
Contemporary Chinese Art: Forever Tomorrow FAQ
What is Forever Tomorrow?
It is the exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki that ARTHIST115 students visited in the Week 5 tutorial. Works discussed include Xu Zhen's Eternity and "Hello", Ai Weiwei's Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Pu Yingwei's China Capital 1978, Shi Xinning's Duchamp painting and performances by Song Dong and Zhang Huan.
Why are Zhang Huan's performances described as futile?
Both works stage impossible tasks. More than forty migrant workers cannot raise a fishpond by a metre, and ten bodies stacked on a mountain raise it only briefly. The shared effort is meaningful, but the futility reveals the larger forces shaping people's lives and, on the mountain, the vanity of human will against nature.
Why does Duchamp appear in a painting by Shi Xinning?
Shi Xinning reimagines a photograph of Mao at a trade show as a visit to a Duchamp retrospective. Inserting Duchamp's Fountain into China's political history subverts the past and acknowledges what conceptual art offered artists of the reform era: new ideas about authorship, appropriation and institutional critique.
Why does Xu Zhen pair the Nike of Samothrace with a bodhisattva?
Both sculptures share a history of plunder. The Nike was removed by a French consul in 1863 and is now in the Louvre, while Greece seeks its return, and the Tianlongshan bodhisattva was pillaged in the 1920s for the international art market. Fusing replicas of the two in Eternity confronts how cultural value circulates and who owns heritage.
Exam move
List the seven works with artist, date and medium, then sort them by what they question: heritage, ideology, empire or social pressure. Pair each with one Week 4 imperial image it answers, for example Eternity with the Longmen Vairocana. In timed practice, choose one performance and one object, and write a paragraph on each that states the strategy before the meaning.
Practise one paragraph that pairs Eternity with a Week 4 imperial work.
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