“Antenna-tenna” is honored to announce the solo exhibition Covey Gong: After the World.

Duration: 2025.5.29 – 2025.7.29

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After the World expands on Covey Gong’s previous project, The World, presented in March and titled in reference to Jia Zhangke’s 2004 film. Set within a theme park on the outskirts of Beijing, Jia’s film captured a moment in the early 2000s when China was entering the global economy and undergoing rapid urban transformation. The film offered a portrait of modern lives shaped by these systemic shifts—an image of modernity built on labor, desire, and displacement.

Two decades later, After the World reflects on what has unfolded within a vastly transformed social and economic landscape. Second-tier cities have become nearly indistinguishable from first-tier ones; rural counties now rise with clusters of high-rises and glass towers. With the expansion of the high-speed rail network, mass mobility has accelerated. Yet many have settled in places that were once unfamiliar, now claimed as  home, integrating into newly constructed urban environments. The boundaries that once defined rural and urban, local and migrant, home and elsewhere have become increasingly blurred and contested.

Probing the logic of the World theme park, both as metaphor and literal site—this project situates these societal shifts within the broader framework of how fantasy and spectacle continue to structure reality. The urban ecosystem, driven by cycles of constant renewal, now reveals the contradictions it once sought to obscure. The idealized image and its infrastructure merge, where fantasy no longer masks reality, but instead becomes its operating logic.

This duality echoes a recent exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Shanghai Museum. Advertised as the largest collection of its kind ever shown in China, the show was guided by China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. While presented as a gesture of cultural exchange, the exhibition also served an economic function—a state-funded event promoting tourism and bolstering cultural prestige. These ancient objects, once sacred and embedded in specific spiritual and social contexts, are flattened into images and spectacles, recontextualized to serve contemporary agendas of nation branding and economic ambition.

After the World draws on strategies from theater and filmmaking, speaking through forms deeply invested in illusion, narrative, and the construction of scenes to reflect on the performative nature of contemporary urban life. Cities are seen as choreographed spaces where identities, movements, and desires are continually scripted and reshaped and where individual agency is subject to infrastructure, legality, and class.

Once rooted in fantasies of the distant, the Other, and the elsewhere, exoticism has now been folded into the machinery of the present, becoming instrumental to the construction of modernity. Historically, the image of the exotic has operated simultaneously as a projection of desire and a mechanism for economic extraction—an engine that continues to hum beneath our reality, where, just as in theater, the sets may change, but the mechanism of fantasy endures and the performance of progress remains layered, uneven, and lived

Text by Covey Gong

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Antenna-Tenna

B1-7, 9 Qufu Road, Jing’an, Shanghai

Wednesday to Saturday 11:00 – 18:30