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Art has served many needs and many functions over its ageless history, and if one of its most important roles is documenting profound changes in profound ways, then few works could be more important in China’s long history than those now sitting in a chapel turned exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland.
During Art Basel 2025, Cracks in Time: Her Decade is screening its premier in public at the Deutsch-ritterkapelle near the Münsterplatz. Directed by Japanese-Chinese filmmaker Sakashita Kiyono, the breath-holding 45-minute documentary journeys through a decade in the lives of 6 female Chinese artists between age 30 and 60.
With the beginning of Her Decade falling shortly after the election of Xi Jinping, and its duration encompassing the whole of the nation’s totalitarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 6 individual short films witness profound societal and economic changes, and explore the strange and not altogether secure world of modern Chinese art.
Also located at the Ritterkapelle is an exhibition of the 6 women’s works curated by Sakashita with assistance from Tom Amatt Pilscheur, an expert in Chinese ceramics and founder of the AAP Gallery which splits its headquarters between Basel and Beijing and who parterneed with Sakashita on the project. The works are thoroughly Chinese and thoroughly communicative, reflecting the deep capacity for inner contemplation associated with all Eastern art, only delivered with a modern voice that appears to whisper and at other times to scream.
The theme of “cracks” represents the artists’ abilities and intentions to portray both disruptions and points of entry—ruptures in time and ruptures in society, memory, and emotion.
Finished just in time for Basel’s Future of Humanity Experience 2025 (June 15th – June 21st) and Art Basel (June 19th – June 22nd) the film will screen at the Ritterkapelle every Saturday and Sunday between 12:00 and 18:00.
Her Decade: The Next Decade
WaL was given access to both the exhibition and the screening.
The exhibition was done in collaboration with Creative Switzerland’s Future of Humanity Experience, which gathered artists, visionaries, futurists, and business minds into a co-creative, 10-hour, art-fueled brainstorming session that sought to crowdsource an answer to the question of what kind of future do we want to see.
Some distorted version of that question must have been in the minds of the artists like Huang Min, Yu Ping, and Shi Liu, whose works, while rooted in the events of a turbulent decade, nevertheless branch out into the next.
“It’s crazy how they’re able to project so much emotion with such simple images and brushwork,” said Federico Ciacci, a visiting Rome-based artist whose work was also included in the Future of Humanity Experience.
In the decade that the artists were at work, the Chinese people were routinely treated to incredible feats of space travel and access, as the Chinese space program built, launched, and manned a new space station, launched and landed its first Mars orbiter, lander, and rover—all of which succeeded on the first attempt—became the first nation since the Apollo missions to bring Lunar soil back to Earth with the Chang’e-5 mission, landed on the far side of the moon with Chang’e-6, and debuted 6 new rockets last year alone.
Far from representing the accomplishments of a decade, all this happened between 2020 and 2024 if one excludes the development time for the craft involved. China also rocketed to second-place in the number of annual rocket launches, concluding 2024 with 68. While space travel wasn’t particularly represented in exhibition, the future certainly was.
A Han Dynasty figurine in terracotta—sporting a robotic head—stood inside the Ritterkapelle at the center of a small Chan rock display, symbolizing how China’s long past is never far from the mind, even when contemplating its future.
The artist, Shi Liu, is a trained and acclaimed robotics technician and AI programmer at Brown University, who departed the field and turned to art to poetically reinterpret the logic of machines and explore the interplay between humanity and machine intelligence—a theme that ran through the Future of Humanity an official collaborator of Cracks in Time.
“Across generations and cultures, the presence of these women artists reminds us: light can emerge from the smallest cracks; even dust can carry a vibration,” said Ms. Sakashita. “This is more than an exhibition—it is a meditative exchange, a gentle whisper of time, being, and beauty”.
Her Decade will close after July 13th, when funding will be sought to convert it into a feature-length documentary, and at the moment will not be shown in theaters or through streaming platforms. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Cracks in Time: Her Decade. PC: AAP Gallery / Sakashita Kiyono, all rights reserved.
