Between 2003 and 2008, the rapidly developing art economy and the sudden investment of capital in art injected alternative stimuli and imagination into the contemporary art world in China. Art practitioners emerged from the intense individualistic context of the 1990s, urged by another urgency to come to the surface, and became deeply involved in the world of economic globalization characterized by borderless capital flows and unpredictable risks. The undercurrent of this process is the economic optimism given by the times. Meanwhile, the linguistic patterns of the neoliberal economy and the long-awaited global travels and dialogues became the main driving force in shaping the internal discourse and promoting the infrastructure of China’s contemporary art world. In parallel, the economic boom has also led to the emergence of life’s illusions, and the dependence on economic development has gradually evolved into a kind of faith that escapes description, which in turn has inspired exploration of the production aesthetics and reflections on global economic flows. These kinds of practices contain farsightedness yet to be discussed.

Up to now, the backdrop of economic decline pulls us in more uncertain directions. Aside from the flâner that continue to create the business dream, a new generation of art practitioners has generally taken a stance away from economic optimism and its multilingual. As the ahistorical, decontextualized contemporary beliefs created by the art economy and the stimulus of capital and its hallucinogenic sense of power begin to dissipate, the economy seems to become irrelevant and no longer carries any emotions or imagination. This is precisely the most characteristic feature of rootless beliefs, that is, beliefs that are quickly dismissed by their believers. As this inevitable turn takes place, it is liable to look back at that optimistic economic era: in addition to having galvanized the production of certain creative paradigms or moods, did it not also leave behind a residue of diseconomies and non-pragmatism? If it would be reckless to simply discard the remnants of those beliefs, how can we develop a more penetrating denial, one that not only questions where we are coming from, but also how we can more accurately identify the position and predicament of our own practice?

This exhibition is inspired by artist Chen Shaoxiong’s site-specific work, Seeing Is Believing, which was created in 2009. This work revolves around taglines the international financial institutions created to call for a brighter future. These words, which appear frequently in the heart of metropolises stimulating the desire of investment, are projected by the artist onto the ever shifting play of light and shadows on the exhibition site throughout the day. Several of the artists in the exhibition have also used different conceptual strategies to discuss economic and capital flows in their practice. Having experienced the high tone of the first decade of the new century, their previous works around this topic give us a glimpse of history. Several new works presented in dialogue with these previous works, which not only expose the incoherence of people during recessions, but also echo economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of the “Business Cycle”: creative destruction will drive people out of the depression and herald the next one.