Group Exhibition | Follow the Feeling
23 March 2024 – 23 June 2024
The song Follow the Feeling, originally sung by Taiwanese singer Julie Sue, became an instant hit in Mainland China after a cover at the 1989 Chinese State Television’s Spring Festival Gala. In Sue’s music video, she is dressed in the latest fashion, jaunting between urban vistas and open highways, describing the increasingly carefree, vivacious individuals, compelled by nothing but the “feeling”. It was over upbeat earworm soundtracks like this that the Mainland Chinese society at the time underwent a momentous gearshift.
The “modern individual” in China, conjured up by the ideas of freedom and love since 1919 May Fourth, has rediscovered their modernity with exuberant feelings and affection during the societal transformation near the century’s end. However, as the lyrics depict, that “feeling” was as if not an internal, natural, self-initiated energy, a push; but an external, synthetic one, a pull. The exhibition Follow the Feeling thus attempts to examine the “feeling” in reform and post-reform China, around which the discourse of intimacy and love revolves. The exhibition explores the production of “feeling” alongside the Times Museum’s long, narrow space, which resembles the highway. Meanwhile, it outlines the often neglected “foundation” of the “highway” by gazing into the residential units underneath the museum, delineating the entanglement between private life and state construction.
Text from Times Museum, Guangzhou
Installation view of ‘Follow the Feeling’ at Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2024. Image courtesy the artist and Times Museum
10 April 2024
