Future Past: tradition and transgression in contemporary art from Asia brings together fifteen contemporary artists working across East Asia, South East Asia and the Asia Pacific to consider the ways in which current art practices in the region interface with and extend beyond the limits of historically determined artistic and cultural boundaries, where they transgress and how these collisions of past and present might inform one another to create an art of the future. A dynamic region animated by tensions between calls to maintain the status quo and voices demanding change, Future Past asks, whether the critical possibilities offered by small acts of transgression by contemporary artists making work in Asia can be considered beyond their value as individual acts in order to form a dynamic accumulation of disturbances with the potential to enact substantial cultural change.

The exhibition includes gallery artists FX Harsono, Jeremy Sharma, Dawn Ng, Irfan Hendrian, Yang Yongliang, Hiromi Tango, and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran as well as invited artists showing with Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney for the first time, including Albert Yonathan Setyawan, Latthapon Korkiatarkul, Gonkar Gyatso, KRACK STUDIO (a collaborative project between Indonesian artists Prihatmoko Moki and Rudi Hermawan, Malcolm Smith and Sukma Smita), Jakkai Siributr, Eko Nugroho, and Adeela Suleman.