Lu Xun (1881–1936) was not the first writer to pen tales in vernacular Chinese, but he spurred the literary form in ways that were unseen before his time. Under his pen (or brush), nothing was sacrosanct, and nobody was untouchable. A group exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Tales of Our Time,” took its title from Lu’s last collection of short stories, Old Tales Retold (1936), in which the celebrated author riffed off eight folk myths to critique early 20th-century Chinese society. The show introduced new commissions by seven artists and artist groups from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. With an accompanying catalog that emulated Lu’s prose style, curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru paid literary tribute to the father of modern Chinese literature—and made a notable attempt to reposition Chinese narratives and culture in the Western art world.

Video installations were aplenty. Sun Xun’s Mythological Time (all works 2016) takes the viewer on a journey through his hometown of Fuxin in northern China, a coal-mining center that faces depletion of its economic lifeblood. In Sun’s animation, fantastical creatures are encased in crystal—a placeholder for processed coal chunks that still contain fossils even when they are about to be burned for winter warmth—linking his city’s current decline with its eventual dystopian, postindustrial landscape. Elsewhere in the museum, Zhou Tao took the viewer south with Land of the Throat, to the Pearl River Delta. The artist shows us the site of a major tragedy in Shenzhen, a metropolis that is still ballooning in every direction. In the video, we visit an industrial zone where a landslide was caused by the over-dumping of construction waste. To Zhou, science fiction has caught up with reality—the land has tolerated humanity’s recklessness long enough, and is reasserting itself in monumental moves, leaving us with a melancholic, quiet aftermath teeming with life as greenery takes over again.

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