New Zealand Arts Review

John Daly-Peoples

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Sat 2 May–Sun 23 Aug 2026

John Daly-Peoples

Next month the Auckland Art Gallery will be opening a  major survey of Chinese contemporary art.

“Forever Tomorrow” showcases how Chinese artists have grappled with China’s transformation since the late 1970’s, producing work that remains visionary and influential today. The exhibition features 67 works by 42 artists and spans performance, photography, sculpture, installation, moving image and new media.

Two years ago the gallery featured a stunning collection of garments by Guo Pei which included  a gown that Rihanna  made famous. The dozens of designs by the Chinese couturier highlighted Guo’s prolific work, with its references to fashion of the past and the present. The exhibition showed how Chinese designers had explored new aesthetic ideas.

“Forever Tomorrow” will demonstrate how Chinese artists have explored, reimagines and reworked art practices, making commentary about important ideas – political, social and artistic.

Dr Zara Stanhope, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited Director of Auckland Art Gallery, says, “Forever Tomorrow” brings to Tāmaki Makaurau a wide range of works that reveal how Chinese artists reflected the seismic shifts that have recently taken place in China and in its relationships  with the world. This exhibition resonates in Aotearoa and in Tāmaki Makaurau as we grow in  cultural diversity and understanding, and in the dynamic cultural experiences it offers that touch us all.”

The exhibition has been curated by Hutch Wilco of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, with  support from Feng Boyi. Feng is a prominent curator and critic who previously served as  director of the He Xiangning Art Museum and Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Art Sociology at the Sichuan Fine Arts institute based in China.

Hutch Wilco says: “Forever Tomorrow” brings together powerful works that register lived experience — labour, migration, family, intimacy, and technology. Spanning generations, the exhibition reveals how artists have given form to the emotional and psychological dimensions  of everyday life. Together, these works offer a compelling portrait of contemporary  experience, inviting audiences to reflect on how these changes continue to shape individual  lives and shared futures.”

“Forever Tomorrow” features work by Ai Weiwei, Xu Zhen, Xiao Lu and Cao Fei, alongside artists exhibiting in Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time including Lu Pingyuan, Pu Yingwei,  Xiyadie, Lu Yang and 2023 Sigg Prize winner Wang Tuo. The exhibition draws extensively on the White Rabbit Collection from Sydney and the M+ Sigg Collection in Hong Kong, with other  works coming directly from artists and their representative galleries.  Key works include Xiao Lu’s Dialogue, 1989, first presented at Beijing’s landmark China/Avant-Garde exhibition, made infamous when she fired two shots into her installation — a gesture entwining the personal with the politics of the time; Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, a photographic series documenting deliberate destruction that questions  history and cultural memory; and Zhang Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond: Beijing, China 1997, a defining performance binding personal memory with collective spirit  through an impossible task.

Highlights include XU ZHEN®’s “Hello”, 2018–19, a robotic Corinthian column that turns a symbol of Western civilisation into an unsettling presence; Cao Fei’s RMB City: A Second Life Urban Planning, 2007, envisions a virtual metropolis in Second Life, while Lu Pingyuan’s Semi-Auto Wandering Gods series, 2024–ongoing, imagines new folk rituals in collaboration with artificial intelligence. XU ZHEN®’s “Hello”, 2018–19 revisits the legacy of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition, examining the enduring logic of censorship and self[1]criticism in the cultural sphere.

From Thursday 2 April, a major sculptural work by XU ZHEN® will be on display: Eternity–Tianlongshan Grottoes Bodhisattva, Winged Victory of Samothrace, 2014. The large-scale sculpture combines a Buddhist figure representative of China’s Tianlongshan grottoes with the form of the Greek sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace, and will be freely accessible to view ahead of the full exhibition’s opening.

“Forever Tomorrow” will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring essays and artist profiles, available exclusively from the Gallery’s Shop.

The exhibition is proudly supported by the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation and the New Zealand Government’s Events Boost Fund.

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Ten Thousand Hours

Gravity & Other Myths

Auckland Arts Festival

Civic Theatre

March 19 – 22

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Gravity & Other Myths

Director: Lachlan Binns

Associate Director: Darcy Grant

Set & Lighting Designer: Chris Petredis

Assistant Designer: Max Mackenzie

Composer: Nick Martyn, Shenzo Gregorio

Costume Designer: Olivia Zanchetta

Production Manager: Martin Schreiber

Creative Producer: Jascha Boyce

Ensemble: Jacob Randell, Alyssa Moore, Kevin Beverley, Lachlan Harper, Annalise Moore, Andre Augustus, Axl Osborne, Shani Stephens

The ten thousand hours rule refers to the concept that it takes that many hours of focussed practice to achieve expertise in a complex field. I suppose that’s why I have never become a contortionist or acrobat even though I did practice for three weekend in a row.

Seeing the eight highly skilled members of Gravity & Other Myths going through their routines is to enter another realm of physical prowess. They manage to do things that most humans would not only find impossible, they would also never even contemplate them. I the reckon the Gravity team probably put in way more than ten thousand hours of practice .

The show starts off simply enough, a few simple lifts, jumps and handstands, all very clever, and the audience was very appreciative but no clapping. But then the troupe  ramp up the action with the performers taking on more elaborate and risky moves and the audience erupts with, lots of  ohhs, and ahh’s and tremendous rounds of applause.

From then on the audience kept a constant steam of applause, whistles and gasps.

The trick that the team seem to have mastered is that of working together, understanding their colleagues’ intentions, working with the team collectively to achieve incredible outcomes.

Some of the inspiration for their work probably comes from the Spanish human towers which are a spectacular Catalan tradition and can be up to ten stories high with up to one hundred people.

The towers of this troupe are only three storied but are pretty spectacular for the ease with which they construct them, the way they can link them and the way they effortlessly deconstruct them.

The group is also very good at throwing each other around. A lot of the time they are like trapeze artists but without the trapeze, hurling each of the across the stage as though they were rag dolls.

There were number of individual acts which start off seeming easy. Possibly a few people could leap, hands first ,across two people lying on the stage but diving across four people would be virtually impossible. So, when one of them manages to dive across six people there was an initial gasp of disbelief followed by massive round of applause.

It is small acts like this which captivate the audience, the attempts by ordinary performers to take on impossible stunts and impossible acrobatic moves. The audiences were always right behind these almost superhuman performers, even when they failed in their attempts, they still got rounds of applause.

In a bit of audience participation one (un)lucky person was cajoled onto the stage where she was quickly instructed in the art of stick figure drawing. After a bit of instruction, she was able to produce a series of composite portraits of stick figures which the group then formed themselves into human versions of her sketchs.

All this tumbling, climbing, throwing and weird acrobatics are supported by Nick Martyn an onstage drummer who interacts with the performers, adding moments of comic relief and hectic drumming solos between the extraordinary acts. 

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Paul Moon, The Art of Colonisation: Images of Europe’s encounters with New Zealand, by

Ugly Hill Press

RRP $55.00

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Paul Moon’s “The Art of Colonisation” is the latest in a number of books which have looked at New Zealand art from a political and social perspective. This reinterpretation of the history of art involves re-examining, challenging, and recontextualizing traditional art narratives through a modern, often critical lens.

He has chosen twenty works, mainly well-known, which record the development of New Zealand and the intersection of explorers and colonists with the indigenous people.

The works range from Isaac Gilseman’s “A View of Murderers Bay (1643) though to Marcus King’s “The Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi” (1938). The years between the dates of these works has produced a substantial amount of written and visual material which records the colonization and development of New Zealand.

Part of that material is the art which was produced at the time. Some of it is personal records, simple sketches and paintings, other works are commissioned works for specific purposes. Moon and other writers have noted that the art of this period is inherently political, serving as a reflection of power, identity, and social values of the time regardless of the artist’s intent.

Moon notes of this period of art production “This was the realm of art, where images of imperial activity and its consequences ranged from disturbing to calming, scientific to whimsical, superficial to intimate and paternalistic to outright injurious”.

By choosing what to create, who sees it, and how it is displayed, much of the art of this early period in New Zealand’s history gives a colonisers viewpoint rather than that of the indigenous.

The first artwork Moon refers to is Isaac Gilseman’s “A view of Murderers Bay” which is a record of the first fateful encounter of European explorer with Māori. Gilseman’s view as Moon recounts was “an image of European cultural and racial narcissism in this period.

Subsequent images Moon refers to include a mixture of landscape, images of indigenous and European constructions and portraits. These include Herman  Diedrich Sporing “A fortified village” (1773) and William Hodges ‘A view of Cape Stephens in Cook Strait with Waterspout” (1776)

Even art that seems apolitical, like portraits or landscapes can be seen as political acts because it is produced in a specific social context, reflecting the established, mainstream standards. 

So even the relatively innocuous portrait of the Mackay family which was commissioned from the artist William Allsworth is shown after Moon’s research, to display the artists or at least the  patriarchs attempt to provide a better pedigree for the family . The tartan which many of the family are wearing is red, white and black whereas the tartan of Clan Mackay is actually blue, black and orange. Moon points out other inaccuracies in the painting as well.

Such minor matters seem to take on greater importance  when rather than details related to family they relate to a town. In referring to Heaphy’s  “View of a part of the town of Wellington (1841) Moon quotes  the Presbyterian Minister John Lang writing about the town at the same time – “it consist of the verist of refuse of civilized society… their usual articles of barter are either muskets and gunpowder or tobacco and rum.. most of them live in open concubinage or adultery with native women”.

Heaphy’s view of Wellington, one of many he produced for the New Zealand Land Company however shows a relatively ordered settlement with stock grazing and well  tended pastures.

Augustus Earle’s “Distant View of the Bay of Islands” (1827) provides Moon with an image which “represents a common view at the time that Europe was at the centre of the world’s values and development” with the artist placing himself at the centre of the image, surveying his domain.

There are several paintings Moon refers to which were painted around the turn of the century which were part of the nation building images which of the time.  Among them is Kennett Watkins “The Death of von Tempsky at Te Ngutu o te Manu” which depicts soldier in dramatic pose yet hides the Māori figures in shadow.

The final image in the book is Marcus Kings “The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi”, painted to celebrate the centenary of New Zealand. Here the image is filled with symbols and flags of the British Empire with little representing Māori.

In the lower left hand, the artist has included a figure turned to the viewer who seems perplexed or appalled at the scene.

In his introduction Moon writes about the “bumpy marriage between art and colonisation…the offspring of this relationship was visual portfolio of imperialism – part record, part propaganda and part prescription …tracing the progression of art’s intricate allegiance with Europe’s colonisation of New Zealand. It is a visual portfolio which still needs to be clarified, reflected on and understood.