Cathy Carter at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition, curated by Hutch Wilco and Zhang Ting, is titled Almost Paradise: Mis/perceptions of Leisure and Labor in the Asia Pacific and features work from 16 artists from China and the Pacific (including Cathy Carter & Gavin Hipkins from Aotearoa). Almost Paradise runs for three months and utilises both floors of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition has opened at a key time for the arts in Shanghai – the week prior to Shanghai Art Week and it will coincide with the West Bund Art Fair.

Conceived as a loose sequel to last year’s Southern Transmissions, Almost Paradise challenges and seeks to upend the western-centric trope of the region as being simultaneously the world’s factory and an idyll for European visitors by centering local images and narratives. Each of the artists illuminate the contradictions and pretensions in the narratives that have sought to define our region, they enlarge and diffuse the locational episteme beyond the simple binary.