Acts of Commoning is a cultural exchange project curated by wen yau in 2019, in collaboration with Asiatopia Foundation. Three HK artists (Vangi Fong, wen yau, and Cally Yu) stay in a village in Nan, northern Thailand between 2 and 15 January 2019.
The 2-week residency was also joined by Thai artists Teetat Saewang, Natthakorn Surintham and Chumpon Apisuk, director of Asiatopia Foundation. During the 2-week residency, the artists hang out with the villagers in Baan Nam Krog Mai and learned how they shared resources and built their community in an intensive social network. The project offered the artists and the villagers a great opportunity to meet each other from different cultures and exchange ideas about our own practices in everyday life, contemporary art and social engagement.
During our stay, the artists conducted or joined workshop internally with the participating artists as well as with local villagers in Baan Nam Krog Mai. We also had 2 public presentations: one for local residents in the Baan Nam Krog Mai where Asiatopia Foundation is located, and another at Nan Identity Hall for local arts and cultural practitioners in the province.
Our first meeting with the villagers in Baan Nam Krog Mai
We, the Hong Kong artists, could not speak any Thai or Nan dialect. Our communication with the villagers depended a lot on Google Translate, and most of the time, our body language and tacit communication indeed. This made our relationship even closer somehow, because all of us, including the villagers and the artists, were striving to share our ideas with each other in every possible way. We temporarily became part of the villagers’ social network, learned our similarities and differences and found our shared values through daily encounters.
The cultural exchange project offered the artists a valuable opportunity to spend time and attain in-depth understanding of the everyday life practices in the rural area of Northern Thailand. Throughout the daily intensive meetings, ideas have been exchanged among different participating artists in the project. The “acts of commoning” in the village, where people not only share resources and time with each other in a strong network of social relations. We are also inspired by the wisdom that villagers has developed for years of how to co-exist with the nature and make good use of all available natural resources in their everyday life practices.
Vangi Fong, one of the participating artists, joined a sharing session held by Play Depot and presented the exchange programme and inspirations we have gained in the process regarding social engagement and community-building. Members of the audience were enthusiastic about the cultural differences we experienced and the notion of “commoning” that we concluded in our project.
The project was co-presented by Art For praXis (Hong Kong) and Asiatopia Foundation (Thailand), with the support of Hong Kong Arts Development Council
© photo by Vangi Fong, wen yau & Cally Yu