Auckland Art Gallery’s Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now 永远的明天：中国艺术进行时 invites you into the lived experience of modern China.

Running until August, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki is currently home to an extensive exhibition of Chinese contemporary art, including the likes of Ai Weiwei as well as artists exhibiting in New Zealand for the first time.

The show is described as the largest major survey of Chinese contemporary art in Aotearoa.

Knowing this, I was hopeful that as a Chinese New Zealander, I would feel a profound connection to some of the 67 works in the show.

And indeed, as I spent more time with the works, I did.

But if I’m honest, at first I didn’t get the first section – but neither was I prepared for a lesson in Chinese art history, because that’s what it ended up being for me, when curator H.

Wilco walked me through the exhibition on a quiet Thursday afternoon.

We began in 1978: a time you could say contemporary Chinese art began sowing its seeds.

Against the backdrop of China’s economic reform and opening-up in 1978, not only were young people in particular influenced by ideas from abroad, but so too were the artistic practices in China.

Important institutions reopened after the Cultural Revolution, including the Central Academy of Fine Art and what’s now known as the China Academy of Art.

As Wilco explained, “It was a period in which hundreds of artist groups and movements emerged across the country, exploding with activity and experimenting with the major artistic languages of 20th century Western art history.” Eventually, these people and practices converged at the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition: the very first national exhibition of contemporary art.

Although performance art was banned from the 1989 exhibition, it ended up featuring – and in no small way.

Wilco brought me over to a small box television in the corner of the room, where we watched the watershed moment when artist Xiao Lu unexpectedly fired two gunshots at her work, Dialogue, prompting panic among attendees.

Acts of defiance like Xiao Lu’s not only characterised the exhibition but mirrored the political zeitgeist, defined by student demonstrations and the Tiananmen Square protests of the same year.

I began to see how each item in this section served as an entry point into these defining cultural moments.

With that cognitive gear shift, items that followed made more sense to me, too.

Wilco said that for those who don’t know anything about Chinese contemporary art, understanding its history is key to understanding everything that follows.

“I thought of this early section of the exhibition as being a bit like a preface to a novel, so it’s a bit didactic in that sense.” While the first section is a sort of art exhibition about art, “everything else that follows is more....