Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now

Copy pasted as is:

Spanning decades of artistic exchange since China’s Reform and Opening Up in 1978, Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now offers a captivating look at how a new generation of Chinese artists have responded to the seismic shifts in society – transitioning from rural to urban, traditional to modern, and industrial to global powerhouse.

The exhibition features a powerful selection of works from international heavyweights including Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong, alongside stunning pieces by cutting-edge artists making their New Zealand debut, including Lu Yang, Pu Yingwei and 2024 Sigg Prize Winner Wang Tuo.

Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now presents fresh takes on traditional Chinese crafts, imposing robotic sculptures and meditative digital landscapes. This exhibition reveals the complexity, innovation and bold vision of Chinese art today, inviting you to discover a dynamic and ever-evolving cultural landscape.

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

city on the cusp of winter

Auckland’s weather has been described as having a warm, oceanic climate with distinct sub-tropical influences, which means warm, humid summers and mild, wet winters. Saturday was dipping just above 10 degrees, but after walking about 2 km from Symonds all the way to the viaduct with precise, well-timed stops at a specialist optometrist store, a newly opened Asian bakery and a small snobbish boutique stocking Celine & Loewe, it was hot.

We have small coffees at a Starbucks and loiter at Britomart a bit at the large public square called Te Komitititanga. This is the tourist part of the city which funnels an endless stream of people taking the ferries back and forth to Waiheke, Davenport, Pine Harbour & Great Barrier Island. This is literally the only part of the city where there is a crowd.

Then it was some more walking for a yum cha lunch at Grand Harbour at the corner of Customs Street West and, Pakenham Street East, where we had barely taken off our coats when the roast pork cart came around (two please!).

There’s no time to feel guilty over a hundred dollars worth of dimsum; you just walk it off again until you come to the Britomart weekend market and see the stalls selling donuts. mochi-cheesecake hybrids and vegan pastries.

But then we didn’t really get dessert so….

Birthday Week food dump

It’s a birthday week now is it?

Food (lately)

  1. I bought a 2kg box of cherries (Central Otago cherries) and ate them all by myself (nearly- gave a small packet to a co-worker) because why not?. I missed them at Christmas, and even then, they’re too expensive and usually not of export-quality, like these. The big market is usually China, and when inexplicably, they’re not all sold out, then it’s half price for poor bastards like me who like them big and firm.

  2. Can you eat tortang talong without rice?? You certainly can. I realised too late that I had two big eggplants that would soon end up in the compost bin so I had to cook them, and torta was the only recipe I knew that had protein in it (I used pork mince). But the meal fell on a non-rice day, so in lieu of that, I had spinach (sauteed) and duck eggs on the side.

  3. For someone who has had fresh, shaved truffles, I never learn. The chips themselves were great, but they’re far, far, far from the real thing. So don’t get scammed- get the real deal or no deal.

  4. Fat on fat; baked eggs on avocado.

  5. I had a bottle of chimichurri sauce, but no steak. Guess what? It works on beef strips.

  6. If you love salted duck-egg anything, here’s a tip, especially if you like to use it for chicken wings. You don’t need a whole carton to get a satisfactory flavour. You can use three or four yolks and augment them with miso and butter.

Mondays

Not well enough to go to work, but not sick enough to spend the day in bed.

So I worked (I was actually on sick leave), but wasn’t compelled to stay on my desk. I did laundry. I made arroz caldo for dinner using chicken drumsticks. I made pork ribs pinapaitan-sampalok for the next night’s dinner.

I did some bench presses in the garage. I did dishes. I finalised what I needed to make for Sam’s birthday. I shaved my head with the new replacement head-shaver (and still marveling how you can get a replacement without any questions asked, by simply returning the item and them finding the receipt in the system). I kept the receipt of this new one in a safe place and took a photo of it for good measure.

I thought I was feeling funny at around 3pm so I went to bed, but ended up watching Tron:Ares on Disney Plus (how can I get Jared Leto’s taut, poreless face??).

It started raining at 5pm and I didn’t bother taking the socks and the houseclothes in from the line.

Scanned for life

Every time I visit, I go through a never-ending pile of photos which I bring home and scan. Some are so damaged that it’s a painstaking effort to clean them up and fix them; AI can only do so much. I should seriously start to think about how what happens next, otherwise, they’ll end up joining 40,000 other digital images in my cloud account.

Christmas 2025

I started this post with, ‘after the gifts have been opened and the food eaten..’ but then stopped myself. Don’t overthink it. The question is very simple- did you have a great Christmas? And if the answer is yes, then that’s all there is to it.

For better or worse, through thick and thin, you should be spending your life with only those who truly matter.

The Weekend

Such a struggle to find JUST protein. And the cravings. The depression (!). The falling off the wagon (who knew the Chinese bakery made really good pork buns, well-seasoned filling, really fluffy dough).

And then we found high-protein pasta! (will try it next time for sure).

I’ve always liked tofu, but I never really went out of my way to buy and cook it. I tried it on Friday and just free-styled it with shrimp, butter and gochujang- sort of like this recipe

The week that was

  1. I’ve been mulling a four-day work week, convinced that it will dramatically change the way I work and live. I’m already envisioning Fridays when I can finish chores (leaving the weekends free), bake (but then I have to eat the darned things), cook (more eating!), write (more staring at an empty screen), draw (why is Procreate so hard??). The possibilities are endless, or I could possibly end up in bed the whole day, exhausted from the previous four days.

  2. Speaking of Procreate, tackling it is the same as going into an Indian supermarket. I want to buy a little bit of everything, attempt to do something, but then realise that I have little to zero knowledge of the ingredients, the culture and the history. Knowing how to cook (or draw), is simply not enough. Where to begin though?

  3. I hurt my shoulder and I don’t know how or where. I thought it was the same shoulder that I injured nearly two years ago but at the physio, it turns out that now it’s the other shoulder (my right). How do I even forget something like this? There’s a sliver of pain with such actions as raising and fluffing the (heavy) winter duvet blanket, or soaping my back with the $2 back-scrubber that I got from Temu. I could’ve ignored it. I could’ve brushed it away as something part of aging (and not necessarily an injury). It could have gone or it could it have gotten worse. But I didn’t let the chips fall where they may, which I used to do a lot in the past. I’m at a point in my life where I marvel at my capacity to be responsible for myself (because who else would??), to know that an intervention is the logical choice. Have an appointment this week for an ultrasound to see what’s up.

  4. I used fresh pasta the other day and didn’t realise how delicious it is. It’s something I normally shy away from. I would rarely ever pick an Italian restaurant - if I wanted to fill myself with carbs, I’d just get a double Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s or get a pizza from Pizza Hut (with two sides of chicken wings). But fresh is something else isn’t it?

  5. I love winter. It makes spending $7 for a coffee every morning at the petrol station justified and necessary.