Tai Kwun’s “Stay Connected” Maps Chinese Art After 2008, From Online Life to the Supply Chain
HONG KONG — At Tai Kwun, a former police compound turned cultural hub in Central, a sweeping two-part exhibition is using 2008 as a fault line for understanding Chinese contemporary art. Titled “Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008,” the project traces how artists responded to the decade and a half that followed China’s Olympic-era confidence — a period shaped by networked life, accelerated manufacturing, and the geopolitical aftershocks of globalization.
The exhibition is presented in two installments to match its ambition. The first chapter, “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud” (September 26, 2025–January 4, 2026), examined the aesthetics and social conditions of China’s early internet. The second, now on view as “Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe” through May 31, turns outward to the material world: labor, logistics, and the human cost embedded in the goods that circulate across borders.
“Supplying the Globe” is installed at JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun (10 Hollywood Rd, Central, Hong Kong). It is co-curated by Pi Li, Tai Kwun’s departing head of art, and organized with Ying Kwok, the institution’s senior curator.
For Pi, 2008 functions as more than a convenient marker. He frames it as a symbolic peak of globalization — the year China hosted the Beijing Summer Olympics under the slogan “One World, One Dream,” even as the Wenchuan earthquake struck and the global financial crisis began to gather force. In his view, the years that followed chart a shift from optimism to skepticism and uncertainty, a mood shaped by cascading events from the US subprime crisis and Occupy Wall Street to later waves of social unrest, including the Yellow Vests movement and Black Lives Matter, and then the pandemic.
The current installment is structured as a thematic sequence that moves from environment to labor to geopolitics. It opens with “Ecological Footprints,” which considers the friction between development and preservation. From there, “Labour Reconfigured” focuses on the people behind manufacturing and distribution — the workers who make contemporary life “comfortable and functional,” as Kwok puts it, yet remain largely abstracted in public imagination.
Kwok argues that the section pushes back against the stereotype of the supply-chain worker as a uniformed figure without individuality. Instead, it asks what it means for artists to embed themselves in production lines, using their own time and effort to test how value is assigned — not only to objects, but to the human body itself, with its fragility and limits, under the pressures of factory environments.
The exhibition then moves into “Networks of Exchange,” which tracks the feedback loop between production and consumption, before arriving at “Global Realignment.” There, the supply chain becomes a geopolitical lens — and, crucially, a personal one. Kwok describes the section as a way to connect shifting power, capital, and resources to migration, diaspora, and the reshaping of identity across borders.
New commissions sharpen the show’s focus on lived experience. Ocean Leung’s “Smile Unit” invites visitors to exchange a badge for a story about something that makes them smile, a small transaction that foregrounds intimacy and narrative within an exhibition about vast systems. Mark Chung’s installation “Grayout” uses the sound of breathing to probe how supposedly optimized environments can quietly condition people toward overwork. And in “Why Not Dance 1,” Li Yifan animates a factory job-hopping influencer, bringing the language of online self-fashioning into dialogue with the realities of industrial labor.
Together, the two-part “Stay Connected” positions recent Chinese art as a record of rapid transformation — from the early internet’s unruly promise to the disciplined rhythms of global production. By treating 2008 as a hinge between eras, Tai Kwun’s survey suggests that the forces shaping China’s artists have also become, inescapably, the forces shaping the rest of the world.
