We present artworks from Chinese artists born after 1980. The majority of these artists come from four crucial artistic environments in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong. GenY deals substantially with information, cognitive issues at large, and technology. Interdisciplinary projects related to urgent matters like climate change, ecology, or big data are some of the issues at stake in this show. So-called contemporary art is a paradigm that originated in the twentieth century. It is a bit old now. Knowledge-intensive based art is gradually taking the lead, namely on our smartphones, our smart streets, and our smart cities.

We are now travelling through a cognitive revolution, namely made possible by digital fibers, LEDs, new carbon materials, rare earth elements, big and small drones, big and small robots, machine learning, cyborgs, and a formidable expansion of computational power fed by 3G, 4G, 5G… telecommunications, cloud computing, and sooner than later by quantum non-binary intelligent systems. The purpose of Gen Y is to study, understand, and exhibit the impacts of this civilizational shift on the creativity and art realms around the world. Linear time is giving up to a rhizome of clocks.

António C. Pinto