The ‘fourth dimension’ pocket with infinite size and the Time Machine in the drawer are symbols of the 22nd century. Technology gives Doraemon the ability to travel to the past using a programmed giant body. Through a “progressive” symbol structure that continuously corrects and guides to (re)shape Nobita1s character.

However, the complex system of symbols was only created by future stories about technology. Nobita hasn't grown up, and technology hasn't solved his problems at the end of stories. Although technology and cultural symbols can accurately reproduce objects and shape public imagination between the object and the narrator, surfaces are made the same way. The exhibition "22nd Century" focuses on establishing connections between different domains of thought through analogy, to examine how the image language of artists is created, magnified, and misinterpreted in the present, ultimately becoming a future illusion that genuinely carries the weight of subjective growth.

This exhibition repositions the image-making created by three artists. Yao Mouin's anime girl after being three-dimensional,shifts from a 2D figure to a 3D body. The material desires are carried as a kind of bodily substance that “fills in” the form and enables this transformation. Yet these desires are often impossible to fulfill. In the artist’s language, materials do not build physical volume on the body itself. Instead, they serve as evidence of a state of “bodilessness.” Through marked boundaries, decoration, and openings, a space of desire is made visible.

Xiong Haoqi’s paintings carry memories of town culture. Weathered walls, broken bricks, and sheets of metal closely reflect the artist`s living environment. These elements shown in a deliberately rough and unregulated state, point to the instability and temporary nature of the social setting. The artist created the infantilized mud figures that are pressing gaps and dividing through brushstrokes and the blurry line, to suggest weakness and a sense of being unable to stand upright. Yet the soft, collapsing brushwork also emphasizes the individual’s capacity to be shaped and to change.

Zhang Shangfeng’s paintings capture the "momentary" quality of images through the male body. The start of an action or the pause of an emotion is frozen, like a frame in a film, fixed at a threshold of uncertainty and threshold.This figure reflects the artist`s observation of real social conditions. It centers on responsibility, pressure, conflict, and a constant sense of crisis. The figure is neithera self-portrait, nor does it belong to any clear identity or location. The artist reassembles fragmented images on the canvas, adjusting them again and again through smearing and layering. To keep the figure in a state of unstable becoming. Finally, the figure feels both familiar and strange, concrete yet virtual. It remains simple, ready to be replaced, and stays in a continuous state of unstable formation.

The three artists explore, from their unique perspectives and material languages, how the virtual images they create are captured, deconstructed, and layered. In the end, these images are placed in a space, which is a state of “in-becoming,” where they can be changed, deleted, fragmented, and reassembled at any moment. Thus,“The 22nd Century” is not a chronological destination, but a temporal fracture we are currently within—at its breaking point, its edge, and in the midst of its unfolding.

Qi Manyu/Text