PG Talk: 'Contemporary Art in the 21st Century' - Gary Zhexi Zhang

Gary Zhexi Zhang delivers our first talk 'Contemporary Art in the 21st Century'. Monday 6th October, 5.30 - 7 pm, LG.02 PSH Was contemporary art the cultural logic of the end of history? As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, the planetary picture is far removed from the urgencies that have occupied art-thought for much of living memory. The art world is ill-equipped for a world in which Western democracies fuel Israeli genocide, algorithms curate culture and the far-right mobilises identity politics to great effect. Neither a strident politics of representation nor a penetrating critique of neoliberalism shed much daylight in a world fast slipping away from Western hegemony. While the cosmopolitan art establishment congratulates itself with what critic Rahel Aima calls “emotional-support biennials”, their indeterminately radical gestures pale in glow of the fires, whether political or environmental, raging each day. At the macro-scale, war, climate, geopolitical reconfiguration and radical technological uncertainty have rug-pulled the shibboleths of industrial Euro-modernity, from liberal universalism to fossil capitalism, while China looks increasingly like the principle driver of history, running on its own globalising logics. The first half of this talk traces the relationship between infrastructural conditions—e.g. the economy, the public sphere, the internet and the state—and contemporary artistic tendencies, and how they have fractured in recent years. The second half will explore how the emerging conditions of a post-Western order—for some, a new genre of modernity—is unfolding in the image of a more decentralised, multipolar world, one which scrambles the political and aesthetic sensorium of early 21st century. BIO Gary Zhexi Zhang lives and works between London and Shanghai. A visual artist and writer, he operates individually, in collaboration, and within organisational frameworks to explore systemic connections between cosmology, technology and economy. Gary recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). Dead Cat Bounce, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and toured the UK. Recent solo exhibitions include METAMERS at EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, and the 11th Asian Art Biennial in Taichung. Gary authored a report on art and technology in China for the British Council in 2025, and is co-author of Future Art Ecosystems III & IV (Serpentine, 2022 & 2024). He is currently writing a book about multipolar technoculture and developing a new commission for Powerhouse Museum, Parramatta.