Golden Heights Estate is a fictional yet perfectly plausible place, an aspirational real estate project in Hong Kong complete with a prescribed and normative lifestyle. The exhibition using this title is a modest investigation into the new landscape of desires carved by the emerging global middle class. As one of the main consequences of globalization’s social restructuring of the world, the consuming middle class has embraced a homogenous culture of desires, fetishes, aspirations and values across different geographies within the ’emerging’ world. As the narrator of this shared global lexicon of signs and goods, the middle class is a crucial keeper of the ideological backbone of the globalized economy. Contemporary art is itself a key component of this system, making an investigation using art’s own means of reflection into the classes enabling our field, an urgent and important exercise. The exhibition observes these realities and contemplates whether there is any class solidarity imaginable in this situation and if so, what could it lead to.
Golden Heights Estate is curated by What, How & for Whom/WHW and Para Site and is part of Meeting Points 7.
