Tomorrow Is Another Day

We have never been so connected—and yet so estranged—as we are today.

 

Global networks promise communication, yet quietly cast individuals into states of dispersion and suspension. The torrent of information never ceases, while meaning drifts away in private, unanchored fragments—"transparent, but not breathable" (Biao Xiang, Hello, Stranger). Amid such systemic vertigo, how might one articulate existence? Gao Yutao offers no grand solution. Instead, he provides a modest yet incisive epistemic tool—the scanner—using it to fragmentarily scan the restless fabric of our times, salvaging from it fleeting moments of concrete dignity that are otherwise overlooked.

 

In an age obsessed with speed, clarity, and immediacy, Gao Yutao deliberately moves "against the grain". He renounces the camera's instantaneity and aggressiveness, turning instead to the almost obsolete flatbed and handheld scanners. Unlike the camera that captures the decisive moment, the scanner allows light to move slowly—like a finger tracing the lines of a text—gliding across the surface of an object, line by line. Pixels accumulate; the image materializes. The process carries a ceremonial solemnity: it demands prolonged, intimate coexistence between artist and object, transforming "seeing" into a form of "close reading".

 

Under Gao's scanning gaze, the overlooked becomes illuminated. Fireworks are typically celebrated as collective spectacles of wonder; what fascinates the artist, however, is the pedestal that remains after the spectacle fades. The scanner dredges it from darkness, granting it protagonism. Inert, charred, and twisted, the pedestal stands as the heavy residue of revelry—testimony to loneliness after release. A discarded metal gear, once recycled and re-cut into blades or parts for resale, is often seen as an act of practical wisdom—"making full use of things." Gao perceives in this gesture something deeper: the fossil of a survival philosophy, an adaptive creativity born of scarcity and necessity. Through such attention, the cold materiality of industry becomes a record of lived intelligence—of human beings negotiating constraint with ingenuity.

 

What Gao conducts is an archaeology of "things". The functional object, once stripped of use or recontextualized through its material or historical singularity, ceases to be a mere object—it becomes a "thing". As Bill Brown notes in Thing Theory, the "thing" compels our gaze, compelling us to ponder its social life and cultural entanglements. By stripping the fireworks base and the discarded gear from their habitual contexts, the scanner releases them from the background, forcing them into presence. They cease to be waste or parts; they become vessels of stories, texts awaiting decipherment. Through this radical gaze, Gao addresses a crucial question: beneath grand systemic narratives, how do real people—diverse, intoxicated, intelligent, or helpless—navigate the complexity of reality?

 

If the scanned works embody Gao's pragmatic stance—a calm practice of observation, collection, and analysis—then his moving-image works form another vital, sensorial voice within the exhibition. In How Long Will the Full Moon Appear, the artist rides a violently rotating swing ride alone, reciting lines by Su Shi in defiance of overwhelming vertigo. Bodily fear collides with the face of civilization; recitation turns into a desperate, guttural cry. The cry transcends linguistic meaning, becoming a raw proclamation of life in confrontation with uncontrollable external forces. In Night on the Spring River, Gao and Siri (Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface) recite Zhang Jiuling's poem Looking at the Moon and Longing of One Far Away along the Rhine. The human voice and synthetic tone intertwine under the ancient moon—strange, yet profoundly moving. The poem once expressed intimate human longing, empathy grounded in shared emotion and memory. In Gao's version, this human–machine duet becomes a scene of cyber nostalgia, compelling us to ask: in an age where technology mimics all, what remains uniquely, irreplaceably human? These two works—one confronting physical fear, the other probing emotional limits—together articulate another response to drifting: "the recitation of poetry". As a condensed cultural code, poetry here becomes weapon and incantation—an invocation defending the fragile dignity of being human.

 

The exhibition opens with an image of a scanned keyhole, inviting viewers into an intimate, inward space. It closes with Floating: Gao repeatedly scans the highest leaf from the tallest tree in Greece using a handheld scanner, then releases its printed images from a printer suspended high above, letting them drift to the ground. The work enacts "drift" in its most literal, physical sense, yet does so tenderly, completing the narrative loop—from the privacy glimpsed through a keyhole to the public openness of falling leaves. The individual's drifting thus mirrors an epochal condition—our collective state of suspension.

 

"Tomorrow is another day." With this line, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind concludes—a chord mingling despair with hope. It is not optimism, but rather a stubborn survival instinct, a declaration of weight amid suspension. If Scarlett O'Hara's "tomorrow" is literature's temporary evasion of reality, Gao Yutao's "tomorrow" unfolds in a world more fluid, more technologized, more real. "Drifting" may be our inevitable condition, but it is by no means the end of the story.

 

Through the scanner's close reading, through the archaeology of things and the re-citation of poetry, we may still capture—within the fragmented slices of our drifting age—those fragile yet resilient human gestures that seek meaning. We are, after all, still learning how to give ourselves weight in the midst of scattering.

 

After all, tomorrow is another day.

 

 

Cui Can is a curator and art critic whose articles have been published in journals, media and publications, including Reading, Wenhui Literary and Art Criticism, National Art Weekly, Meichengzaijiu, and West Encounters East (Shanghai Museum). Currently serves as Director of M Art Center and Co-founder of the Black Book.

 

Graduated from the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology at Fudan University, Cui has been deeply engaged in the contemporary art scene. Her curatorial practice often adopts an anthropological perspective, exploring the relationships between technological iteration, narrative language, and the construction of memory. She has curated exhibitions including The Invisible Laws, A Time to Spring, Post-Visualization: Other Realities, and Contact Printing.