“Untitled, Future Drama, It’s Up To You, What You Say is What You Say”

Over the past decade, China’s contemporary art industry has continuously sought methods for public dissemination in its foundational development. Coupled with the rise of internet social platforms, we have indeed witnessed waves of responses from various online platforms targeting artists, artworks, exhibition planning, art fairs, and more. At the same time, driven by this intense desire for public engagement, artistic creation seems to have lost its secrecy, no longer requiring intellectual effort to unveil its inner layers. The long-standing global acceptance of interdisciplinary development in contemporary art has rendered the concept of “China” within the fragile and fragmented discourse of art disciplines even more ambiguous and abstract. Many creators have gradually lost their yearning for empathy, synchronicity, and reconnection—everyone can become an isolated island, appearing romantic yet disoriented, chaotic yet enigmatic.

In the early 1980s, during the theoretical evolution of domestic stage design, the concept of “theatrical assumption” was introduced to dismantle the dominant “illusionist” approach to stage art. The reality of any object acknowledged by the actor constituted an internal truth of the drama—if an actor “assumed” something to be a tree on stage, their performance could affirm it as such, making it real and indisputable. Today, this interpretive right belongs to every individual on the internet.