What is Chinese dreamcore? Hong Kong exhibition leans into millennial anxiety
An exhibition at Gold in Wong Chuk Hang dives deep into the dreamcore subgenre given rise to by mainland China’s rapid urbanisation
“Chinese dreamcore” taps into the weird, discordant architecture that the country’s netizens have grown up with and glamorises the kind of kitsch that has accompanied such fast development.
“I’ve always been very interested in dreamcore as an internet art aesthetic or just a visual style,” says Shirley Lau, associate curator of Serakai Studio and a native of China’s Sichuan province in her early thirties.
Lau, who moved from the small town of Guangyuan to Sichuan’s provincial capital of Chengdu as a child, witnessed an abundance of urban, social and technological changes in the late 1990s and 2000s.
That kind of accelerated change was not exclusive to mainland China, and in researching for the show, Lau discovered non-Chinese artists and designers with similar memories from that period who have incorporated them into creations that reflect the bewilderment and ambivalence towards progress keenly felt by their generation.