2017.12.16 Sat, by
FUTURE LIFE HANDBOOK, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art

[Press Release]

On 16th December 2017 at 16:30, the Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA) will open FUTURE LIFE HANDBOOK, the 1st exhibition in its Young Artists Programme, that will show the work of 6 young artists resident in China and Berlin. An Opening Panel will take place before the opening 14:30 – 16:30, 16th December; Mariana Hahn will present a specially commissioned performance during the opening.

The exhibition curator is Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director of MOMENTUM, Berlin; the academic director is Dong Bingfeng, Research Fellow, School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art, Beijing.

Artists: Aaajiao (born Xi’an works in Berlin and Shanghai), Amir Fattal (born in Tel Aviv, works in Berlin), Mariana Hahn (born in Schwäbisch Hall, works in Berlin), Law Yuk-mui (born and works in Hong Kong), Miao Ying (born Shanghai, based in Shanghai and New York), Zijie (born Yulin, works in Shanghai).

Opening Panel
2F Academic Hall, RMCA Hall 1
In Mandarin and English
Speakers: Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director of MOMENTUM, Berlin;
Dong Bingfeng, Curator and Research Fellow, School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art, Beijing;
Artists: Aaajiao, Mariana Hahn and Zijie.
Moderator: Vivienne Chow, Journalist, Critic and Founder of Cultural Journalism Campus.

Performance
Stored-story Body-archive
Mariana Hahn
In front of RMCA Workshop [A3] during the opening.

Organized by Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA) In collaboration with MOMENTUM, Berlin and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Guangzhou.

ABOUT FUTURE LIFE HANDBOOK
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.

Berlin: a city of only 3.5 million people has become known internationally as the ‘Art Capital of Europe.’ For almost 30 years it has attracted artists from around the world who, feeding on and into its creative energy, have made it their adoptive home. Berlin is a city where everyone always seems to be from elsewhere; it is still rebuilding and repopulating itself 70 years after the disaster of World War II; it seems to be a place perpetually atoning for its painful and violent history and it is now re-inventing itself through culture.

Guangzhou: a city with a population of over 14 million in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, has historically been a fount of new and radical ideas about art and culture as well as China’s southern gateway to the rest of the world. As it has developed over the
past 40 years it has become not only an economic and cultural powerhouse emblematic of change in China but also has turned its face again outwards.

In bringing to RMCA three young Berlin-based artists from different countries with three Chinese artists we are again opening that gateway to let the voices of today’s generation speak about the issues common to our experience, despite the diversity of our backgrounds.

ABOUT THE RMCA 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 ‘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, art’s 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 workshops or laboratories as the concerns of artists, curators, designers, architects, intellectuals and the public begin to converge. The aim of the RMCA Young Artists Programme is to provide through exhibitions, residencies and its public activities an ever-broadening platform for this process to take place.