Future of Today Biennial: To Your Eternity

To Your Eternity, the fourth installment of the Today Art Museum’s art and technology themed biennial, zooms ever slightly away from an obsession with the now and the next, but revels in unlikely, luminous juxtapositions across geography and time: Isamu Noguchi’s 1947 monument for a world after humans with Siah Armajani’s 1969 attempt to build mathematically viable towers towards the limits of the earth’s gravitational pull; retro-style video games exploring China’s first wave of entrepreneurship with extreme speculations of a post-Socialist “thousand-year plan”; a space artist in search of fallen rockets with a photographer chasing tornadoes in the eye of the storm; virtual simulations that transport visitors to the wetlands of the Rhone delta as well as the caves of Alaskan glaciers; the aesthetic possibilities of merging bodies and machines with cross-species reproductive technology; the beguiling world of jinns that transcend space with new sci-fi stories about languages that warp time; “Asian Futures without Asians” in Hollywood’s entertainment industrial complex; stately portraits of Huawei’ figurehead with a migrant worker’s durational, maximalist record-making of precarious labor. 

The exhibition takes its title and spirit from the 2021 anime To Your Eternity. Created by Yoshitoki Ōima, the story follows an amorphous alien entity as it approximates various forms of inorganic, plant, animal, and ultimately human lives through inhabiting their life cycles. This trans-species metamorphosis is spurred by the death of the previous host, expanding the definition of “intelligence” to also encompass feelings, embodied experiences, and situated knowledge against a grander scale of time. The exhibition similarly hopes to immerse visitors in an exhilarating range of artistic and philosophical perspectives on what technology means for our imagination, heart, and livelihood beyond media novelty or gadgetry. To Your Eternity features an unusual range of media: VR experiences, AI and algorithm-based art, games, video, lecture performance, sculpture, drawing, wallpaper, photography, tapestry, lacquer, mural, and monument. By inserting crucial art historical examples from the mid-20th century into the mix of more recent work, the exhibition invites ponderings on longer throughlines in historical conditionings of our current technological and existential crisis that never truly went away. 

To Your Eternity presents special commissions from artists Tishan Hsu, Morehshin Allahyari, and Astria Suparak. In the opening weeks, public programs include lectures and workshops with artists Li Jiabao, Liu Xin, and zzyw, as well as a book launch with NYU Shanghai for Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2023).

Artists: aaajiao, Morehshin Allahyari, Siah Armajani, Ching Ho Cheng, Tishan Hsu, Natalie Ivis, Jiang Yifan, An-My Lê, Li Jiabao, Ani Liu, Jen Liu, Xin Liu, Lu Yang, Toshio Matsumoto, Miao Ying, James J. A. Mercer, Isamu Noguchi, Pan Caoyuan, Francesco Paterlini, Peng Ke, Agnieszka Polska, Walid Raad, Mark Ramos, Sarah Rosalena, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Astria Suparak, Pelin Tan + Anton Vidokle, Wang Ye, Wu Ziyang, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Zhan Youbing, zzyw (Yang Wang + Zhenzhen Qi) with Jiaoyang Li, Qianlin Li, and Zongying Liu.

Curator: Xin Wang
Director: Jessica Zhang
Curatorial team: Yan Yan, Xin Zhan, Jinger Xu, Kewei Xiong, Tianrun Zhao
Visual design: Pianpian He, Max Harvey
Exhibition design: Yiran Mu, Nianlai Zhong (advisor)

Curator bio
Xin Wang is an art historian and curator based in New York. Currently writing a PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she is also a Visiting Critic at Yale University’s MFA program in Photography. Her forthcoming publications include a chapter titled “Machine Envy” in Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2023) and an essay for choreographer Benjamin Akio Kimitch’s monograph Tiger Hands. 

Today Art Museum 
Established in 2002, Today Art Museum is one of the first private nonprofit art museums in mainland China. A pioneer that has transformed the contemporary art landscape in China as well as urban culture in Beijing, TAM aims at exploring three pillars—contemporary art, technology, and design in the global context. TAM is committed to providing an open platform for artists, the public, and interdisciplinary inquiries. 

Media Contact: Sophia Wu, pr [​at​] todayartmuseum.org.