happiness is only real when shared responds to Gus Fisher Gallery’s 2019 exhibition We’re Not Too Big to Care. Considering the gallery’s surrounding commercial landscape, We’re Not Too Big to Care explored what it might mean to rise above the fast paced, cyclical structures of contemporary life to enable us all to regain a sense of humanity.

happiness is only real when shared continues the dialogues raised through We’re Not Too Big to Care from an altered landscape post-2020. The exhibition features three artists who each address modern capitalist desires with astute criticality and satire and ponders the current moment through a surreal maze of animation, site-specific installation, and sculpture. Titled after a bittersweet cliché in Wong Ping’s famed Fables series (2018-19), happiness is only real when shared aims to jolt us from the throws of daily living and into a tumultuous and alternative mise-en-scène where transformation and individual reflection may become possible.

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Sam Gaskin, ‘In Conversation with Wong Ping’. The Art Paper, March 2021.

Lynn Freeman with Mark Schroder, ‘Artist Mark Schroder takes on modern corporate culture’, Standing Room Only, RNZ, 14 February 2021.