Exhibitions20182050: A Brief History of the Future

This was the third stage of an exhibition that was first set up in Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) and Paris in 2015 (Louvre Museum, in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo), then in Milano in 2016 (Palazzo Grassi). Based on the successful essay by famous French economist and thinker Jacques Attali, 'A Brief History of the Future', it gathered works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Wharol, David LaChapelle, Andreas Gursky, AES+F, Alighiero Boetti, Mona Hatoum, and many others to demonstrate how contemporary art deals with critical issues such as economics, ecology, social inequalities. Can art help us understand today’s world challenges? What will the world look like in 2050 if nothing changes?

The exhibition invited a total of more than fifty participating artists from Taiwan and abroad to adopt an angle of thinking about and probing the future from the point of view of contemporary works of art in exploring many of the social issues in today's world. This was the first international exchange exhibition to be co-organised by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Taking place in Taiwan and curated by Pierre-Yves Desaive, this edition of the show focused on the exchanges between the East and the West, including artists from all over the world such as Ai Weiwei, Phil Akashi, Fung Ming Chip, Jenny Holzer, On Kawara and Gavin Turk.