For the artist, the contents in the clippings of 1962 reflect a period of relative relaxation for art in China after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, despite the famine and deaths which followed the Great Leap Forward. As Wu was cataloging Cahill’s clippings in New York in 2020, she recognised an indescribable scar stretching across the past and the present, where feelings of displacement, absence, curiosity, and the longing for an alternative world all intersect.
similar desire of longing frames the second part of the exhibition. Forget Each Other in the Rivers and Lakes suggests a new way of being together: mourning or celebrating, an end or a beginning of relationships. Inviting artist peers who either hide their identity in order to continue unfinished missions in a specific geographical locale, or whom mysteriously retreat to the spiritual realm whilst waiting for a new world to be born, both poetic and speculative, their works are often the opposite of a thesis. Rejecting artificial clarity, their practices deliberately stretch themselves out towards a space of charged in-betweenness. A space of connection is then created for a reimagining to happen, in this recurring transition between the old and the new world, what do their hearts say?
