Oh Dear! Oh Dear! I Shall be Too Late!
Curator: Chan Yu Ying
Artist：
Meng Qingjun, Qi Baiting, Qin Ni, Shao Annan, Wang Xinyan, Yuan Haiyu, Zhang Jialei
Exhibition Dates: 2026.3.21-2026.5.5
Opening: 2026.3.21 16:00
Venue:Hive | Beijing
Address.
E06, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, Beijing
The exhibition draws its inspiration from the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who leads Alice down the rabbit hole. Throughout the story, the White Rabbit anxiously repeats that he is going to be late. Often interpreted as a “messenger of time,” the White Rabbit does not represent time itself, but rather a subject driven by it—perpetually late, perpetually anxious, and endlessly pursued by schedules. With the establishment of modern systems of timekeeping, time gradually shifted from natural rhythms to a system governed by clocks and order. The White Rabbit, in turn, became a symbol of this temporal logic.
In a sense, the order shaped by this system of timekeeping carries a certain absurdity of its own. While seemingly emphasizing rules and efficiency, it continuously generates new forms of anxiety and repetition. Driven by schedules and the measured divisions of time, people struggle to keep pace with an ever-accelerating rhythm, yet rarely seem to arrive at any definite destination.
Within the context of contemporary culture, this condition has become something closer to an ongoing mode of existence. People remain perpetually caught in a present defined by the feeling of “not having enough time,” often without even knowing what exactly they are late for. Yet lateness itself has already become a way of being.
In this exhibition, this condition of being driven by time is transformed into distinct visual narratives through the artistic practices of the participating artists.