The Parallel Exhibition of the 4th iSTART Children’s Art Festival:”Little Bang”

When facing the world alone,

Throughout the long history of mankind, children have often been passively recorded and described, becoming a voiceless group due to their lack of opportunities to speak and express themselves. Imagine if they were given greater power, could they bring about changes to the world? Liu Cixin’s novel “Supernova Era” provides us with a possible scenario: after the world is attacked by mysterious rays, adults disappear, leaving only children under 13 to continue living. How would they survive? Where would the world be headed? These questions are explored within the story…

Today, we liken this exhibition to a small “cosmic explosion,” forcing our children to face the world alone, which opens up another kind of imagination: hundreds of children and their parents begin to confront the reality of “a world ruled by children,” constructing their own new worlds through months of discussion, drawing, and action. We will not only see the sweet and idealistic cities imagined by children, but also their reflections on the “cruelty of war” through animations; we will read hundreds of self-reflective “journals of the future” and also confront the images of “spiritual legacies” left by parents for their children…

This is just the beginning. We hope to encourage children to put their imaginations of changing the world into action and spark reflections in the adult world about established orders. As the American philosopher and architect Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

——Li Jie