Yesterday's Future

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them — certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.


Themes about the past, especially that of childhood and coming of age, do present an unmistakable and irresistible allure. In almost everywhere, there exist an unashamed culture of nostalgia in the younger years and relentless confrontation with the grips of forgetting. We embrace fragments of our youth with such fascination and enthralling universality and interest. The same existentialist sense binds together this show. These artists turn to their childhood memories of playful past and fragments of their real and imagined younger selves while contemplating on the present and the future.


Moreover, childhood is a foundational stage of our humanity invariably is a stage of revelation. It is often made of exciting epiphanies and games of imagination and itis that delicate moment where we mold what we want to be. It is that time when we nurture and cultivate our dreams and possibilities through our plays and childhood acts of make-believe. In the absence of readymade toys, mundane objects are transformed into sophisticated crafts, and ordinary spaces become realms and limitless terrains of what we can imagine and where our imagined rules only mattered. With images suggesting and playing on the tropes and symbolic grammar of toys and games, these artists textualize each artwork with interpretations and remembrances of their own and the collective feelings of childhood and their nascent years. This show brings to mind what British critic and essayist once said, “the true object of all human life is play.”