Yangjiang Group, Das Kapital Football, 2009. Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space

“Can you feel the energy?”, a translator asks me as I sip on a pungent tea. This particular tea is over 100 years old, the third variety I have been offered by Zheng Guogu, founder of the Yangjiang Group of artists. To my faint surprise, I can. Zheng gestures to the point where his throat meets his chest, the soft centre of the collarbones. This, he tells me, is the point the energy of the tea focuses, from which we become enmeshed in our surroundings.

The Yangjiang Group, named for the coastal city in the Guangdong Province from which they come, was formed by Zheng in 2002 (“we used to drink together, now we drink tea together”, he says). Guogu is the senior member of the group; he has shown internationally at high profile events like Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and the Auckland Triennial. Their exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Actions for Tomorrow, is Zheng’s first in Australia.

Actions for Tomorrow is the latest in a series of commissions through which 4A has engaged contemporary Asian artists. It’s an exciting show, not least because it will introduce the Yangjiang Group’s work to many in Australia. “It’s important that audiences enter with an open mind”, says curator and director of 4A Aaron Seeto. For Zheng and his collaborators, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin, he explains, Actions for Tomorrow should be a complete sensory experience, unabated by expectations and formal concepts. Art is not only a visual experience, Zheng says.

Art may not only be a visual experience, but Actions for Tomorrow is undeniably a powerful visual offering. At the entry of the gallery sits FINAL DAYS (2015), a new work that recreates a traditional clothing shop, frozen. As I arrive the finishing touches are being put on the work, installers dripping a final coat of wax over racks and tables of casual clothing. It’s an arresting sight, a relic of boutique capitalism trapped in a future it may have no part in. It’s also indicative of the degree of resolution, both technical and conceptual, that unfolds across Actions for Tomorrow.

The themes of commerce and economics run throughout; from the poetic FINAL DAYS to the calligraphic wall work GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE RMB!, which postures the RMB (Chinese currency) as a pseudo-religious being. The other major work on display, Das Kapital Football (2009 – 2015), is equally critical of contemporary commerce. The large dynamic installation features some 7000 calligraphic scrolls created by copying Marx’s Das Kapital, tattered as a result of being strewn across a football pitch on which three games occurred simultaneously (the work includes video documentation for those that may question the possibility of this action), and strewn across a massive plinth, one section of which seems to breathe and vibrate.

It’s not only fiscal economies that the show addresses. Woven into the highly aesthetic and politically charged works are economies of communication, belief and action. In our everyday lives and our smallest gestures, the Yangjiang Group suggests, we are remarkably connected, not only with each other but also with our ideas and the world around us. This spiritualism is at the core of Actions for Tomorrow. God, Zheng tells me, is not outside us. God is a flow of energy that runs between all things. He gestures again to his throat, and to mine. “Can you feel the energy of the work?” he asks. “The tea enters your heart and opens it to the work”. This time, there is no surprise. Tea or not, the energy of Actions for Tomorrow is palpable, and not to be missed.

Actions for Tomorrow, Tues to Sat 11am-6pm until 7 March, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay Street, Sydney; (02) 9212 0380, 4a.com.au