Invited by HALLE 14, Leipzig, Germany, I participated in “The Ends of Freedom” exhibition which runs from 7/9 to 7/12/2019. I decided to use this as a platform for voices from Hong Kong in turmoil. A gigantic 10m x 5m “Lennon Wall” was created with 2,000 posters, plus some work of moving images I gathered from local artists and others on the Anti-Extradition protests in Hong Kong.
Read more “Wir sind das Volk! (homage to all peaceful revolutionaries) (exhibition)”
In the ICAS11, I convened a panel Our Commoning Practices in Turmoil: A Comparative Account of Hong Kong and Taiwan and presented a paper titled “Acts of Commoning: From Public Space to Public Sphere.”
Read more “The 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS11)”
– a performance-lecture, 9/07/2019, grunt gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Read more “As the curtain fell… (homage to all peaceful revolutionaries)”
In the Performance Studies International (PSi#24) conference, I presented a paper titled Art & Civil Society:
Performing Resilience in the face of Populism and Authoritarian regime.
The notion of performativity has often been deployed in examining the social and discursive construction of identity through embodied (re)enactment (with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity a notable example). Focus on the performativity of our own practices allows us to scrutinise and anticipate the development of protest repertoires in artists’ cultural activism—in turn enabling us to reflect more critically upon the ‘constructedness’ of these repertoires. While cultural activism involves tactics of performing resistance and dissidence, it also involves a series of critical acts of transferring knowledge and cultural memories via ephemeral yet resilient embodied actions—even (or perhaps especially) in politically challenging times like these.
The full article was commissioned by Asia Art Archive and published on their website as part of their Shortlists. Shortlists offer thematic selections from AAA’s Collection, including overviews and annotations by invited contributors.
The past is haunting us from time to time like a ghost. Things may recur as they were but we by no means can redo the past. You, the Future, on the other hand, are our crush, a figment of our imagination. You are the unknown, so uncertain and unprecedented that we cannot be absolutely sure of. You are so intangible and unreachable that we would only endow you with our hope and/or even wishful thinking in a world where populism seems to override authenticity and money to outweigh humanity. You are the muse of make-believe, and the changes we envision to make are for an imaginary ‘you’ that we ever seek to meet. The enchantment of performance keeps us musing on the possibilities of freeing ourselves from the status quo.
The full article was published in Global Performance Studies issue 2.2.
文：梁嘉麗
平權之路，從來不平坦。#Metoo 是星火燎原，女性身體由私密之地，變成攻訐之所，沒有任何人能倖免，因為性別之爭，本來就是一種權力拉扯。香港女性藝術工作者同樣面對困境，很多人選擇以「性別盲」方式看待藝術圈運作，在性別嚴重失衡的香港藝術界，這些依然努力創作的女性，也許必須身懷十八般武藝和擁有真切澄明的心，才能繼續生存下去。
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.
Read more “Acts of Commoning: a HK-Thai Cultural Exchange Project”
