A research project initiated by Ho Rui An and Zian Chen in collaboration with Feng Haoxin, Liew Xiao Theng, Sun Jiyuan, Wang Ruohan, Xiong Xin, Yan Jiayue, Zeng Yuting, Zhang Tianyu, Zhang Yilin, Zhou Feiyang
Duration: 7th-11th Oct, 2023
Public Program: 7th Oct,2023 (Sat)
Organizers: Ming Yuan Group, Ming Contemporary Art Museum
Supported by: DKUNST Art on Campus｜Division of Arts and Humanities | Humanities Research Center, Duke Kunshan University
Drawing the Lines: Spinning and Weaving Histories at a River’s End is a research project initiated by Ho Rui An and Zian Chen that examines the historical development of the textile industry within the Yangtze River Delta region beginning in the late nineteenth century. Following a six-month process of fieldwork, archival research, and workshops supported by Duke Kunshan University’s (DKU) DKUNST Art on Campus program and with the participation of DKU undergraduates, the project culminates in a research-based installation and one-day public program at Ming Contemporary Art Museum—formerly the premises of a paper machine factory in a reflection of Shanghai’s industrial heritage.
The installation organizes the materials gathered over the research process into three sections, namely Narration, Network, and Noise, each providing an artistically inspired framework to probe into the shifting relations between labor, technology, and capital across over a century of textile histories in the region. Through the public program, the objects and images on display are further articulated through a series of live interventions that include a lecture, guided tour, mapping exercise, and tea session with former textile workers.
The DKUNST Art on Campus program is curated by Prof. Zairong Xiang.
Nikita Yingqian Cai is Artistic Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Times Museum. She has curated exhibitions such as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016) , Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Guangdong Times Museum, 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Belin, 2019) , Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021) and One song is very much Like another and the boat is always from afar (2021). She initiated the para-curatorial series in 2012 and launched “All the Way South” research network in 2016. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019.
Public Lecture: When a Trebuchet Met a Museum
Tuesday 25th April 15:00 – 17:15 | AB 3107
Over the past five years, Nikita Yingqian Cai has been focusing on curating an interdependency in the evolving network of Times Museum. By referring to a case of how a trebuchet entered a contemporary art museum, how it was fabricated and contextualized in an exhibition she curated in time of the pandemic, Cai maps the variety of human agencies and non-human actors in the network of a museum, and unpacks the disparate tools of ‘curating’ and the expanded field of ‘the curatorial’.
In Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison, the artist offers a speculative archaeology of the ‘Black Death’. Rather than being an inert object, the ‘trebuchet’ (used by the Mongol army to siege the town of Caffa in 1347) materializes how the Asiatic ‘other’ might have become associated with disease and condemnation in the fourteen century European context, connects the administrative activities of exhibition-making with the formative events of the curatorial to tell a history of the present. By inserting things into already existing conditions and setting up a friction between them, a shadowed context is activated and may subsequently change what we think it is all about. In this sense, the curatorial allows us to blur boundaries and categorizations thus challenging their constraining powers, and forms a constellation of meanings. So when a trebuchet met a museum, it sent off a recurring process of unlearning which inquires what might have or could have been.
In this public lecture, Nikita will also share some insights into different career paths in the broad field of museum, exhibition making, and contemporary art.
(organized by prof. Zairong Xiang, with support of AH, HRC, and DKUNST Art on Campus)
Religion+Art, with Zairong Xiang
Date/Time: April 11, 6:00-7:30pm Location: DKU Water Pavilion*Snacks and drinks provided! Join us!
The Tuesday Night Conversation Series, Religion+X., hosted by Religion+ research group of the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University, will take place every Tuesday from 6:30pm-8pm and feature DKU religious studies professors James Miller, Tommaso Tesei and Ben Van Overmeire in informal conversation with other DKU professors on a wide range of topics. Snacks and drinks will be provided, and students are warmly invited to join in the conversation with the professors. Events are planned to be in person, but may be moved online in accordance with Covid policies.
See the line-up for the coming weeks: https://sites.duke.edu/dkuhumanities/religion-group-announces-tuesday-night-conversation-series/
The Artist-in-Residency program is organized by DKUNST Art on Campus curated by prof. Zairong Xiang, co-sponsored by the Division of Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center.
On Tuesday April 11th, internationally renowned artist Ho Rui An will give a public lecture on his artistic practice; together with his collaborator Zian Chen they will also introduce their current research project titled “Drawing the Lines: Politics and Technology in China’s Industrial History.” Students will have opportunity to join their team as research assistants. Curious about how artists do research and what is a “research-based artistic practice”? Interested in the history of textile industry in our own Yangtze River Delta region? Join us on Monday!
Time: 3:45 to 5:50 Tuesday, April 11th 2023
Location: AB 3107
Biographies
Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his research examines systems of governance in a global age. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Singapore Art Museum; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Zian Chen collaborates with artists and writers to develop alternative frameworks for thinking and speculation. He is one of the founding members of Pailang Museum of Settler Selves (2022–), an editor-in-residence for Compost in ICA NYU Shanghai (2021–2022), as well as one of the editors for Made in Public (2022) and Arrow Factory: The Last Five Years (2020). He has also curated Production Fever 2008: Study Materials in Nida Art Colony, Nida (2022). In 2020–21, he was one of the founding editors for Heichi Magazine, an online journal for contemporary art published weekly in Chinese and English.
PROGRAM
PART I: Ho Rui An’s Artist Talk (3:45 – 4:45 pm)
Title: Ways of (Not) Seeing “the Economy”
In recent years, the projects of Ho Rui An have sought to understand what it means to observe the thing we call “the economy”. Through works that have examined such seemingly abstract and expansive phenomena as financial capitalism and the so-called socialist market economy in Reform-era China, his artistic practice seeks to produce knowledge and make arguments that returns them to the body. This presentation explores the ways that economic abstractions come to be embodied and proposes embodied modes of observation that question what it is exactly we talk about when we talk about “the economy”.
PART II: Presentation of the Research-based Art Project at DKU (5:00 – 5:50 pm) Title: Drawing the Lines: Politics and Technology in China’s Industrial History
Since 2018, Ho Rui An and Zian Chen have collaborated across various projects researching the material networks and geopolitical imaginaries that have animated the regions of East and Southeast Asia. Expanding the narrative developed in Ho’s recent film, Lining (2021), which examines the rise and decline of the textile industry in Hong Kong, their residency at Duke Kunshan focuses on the development of the industry within the Yangtze River Delta before its displacement to Hong Kong in the late 1940s as well as the subsequent “return” of industrial capitalism to the mainland following the launch of China’s economic reforms.
In this presentation, they will share their preliminary observations gathered from their ongoing archival and field research. In considering the shifting historical relations between labor, technology, and capital in China, they identified a recurrent theme especially present in the textile industry: the politicization and depoliticization of technology. From the import of Western machinery as a means of national salvation in the early twentieth century to Maoist-era experiments in collapsing the distinction between manual and technical labor to the restructuring of state-owned enterprises under the pressures of technological displacement during the Reform era, the lines of politics and technology continually meet and part along a historical trajectory that has culminated in China’s deeply unsettled postsocialist condition.
The speakers will also share details for an open call for participants to join their research between August and September this year.
Lining (2021), Ho Rui An, 4K video (Courtesy of the Artist)
Are you interested in contemporary art and want to gain relevant experience? Do you want your writing to be exposed to international audiences?
The Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai and Professor Xiang Zairong, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Director of Art at Duke Kunshan University, are currently working on a joint art project with the artist collective Ci Zhi 刺纸. In two workshops that will be held in Shanghai and Kunshan in February and March, the artists will work on a printed publication and the production of a drifting book bag reflecting stories and matters of trust in our society. Their artistic contributions will be part of the Kultursymposium Weimar 2023 (https://www.goethe.de/prj/ksw/en/index.html).
Application Deadline: 12 February, 2023 by 23:59 BJT
What is a thing? What is an object? These seemingly simple yet profoundly complex ontological questions have been explored by artists and thinkers across culture and time. In the specific setting of contemporary exhibition making (a specialty of MACHANG for almost a decade with the booming contemporary art scene in Shanghai and in China at large), what matter matters in an art exhibition? What does not? What matters before the installation of an exhibition and after its show time is over? What do we do with the materials left behind an art exhibition – the frames, pigments, dry walls, etc. – other than throwing them in the garbage and turning them into waste? How might we archive these things before and after their use value has been exploited?
Over the three days of “Beauty Salon 2,” the artists in residence, who referred to themselves as “老妖精 (_ao_ao_ing)” created a temporary living room on DKU campus where DKU community members could participate in the happenings, in the name of art. Here’s a recap of the event filmed by Zhixian Zhang (Class of 2023) and Junyi Yu (Class of 2025), and filmed and edited by Yuzhe Zhong (Class of 2025).
Artist-in-Residence at DKU is supported by Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus, convened and organized by DKU’s Associate Director of Arts, Professor Zairong Xiang.
Artist-in-Residence at DKU is supported by Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus, convened and organized by DKU’s Associate Director of Arts, Professor Zairong Xiang.
Established in 2018, _ao_ao_ing (老妖精) is a Shanghai-based performance ensemble that is continuously morphing and finding its shape. With six core members from different disciplines and backgrounds, the ensemble uses contemporary experimental theatre as their main medium, but their creation also includes participatory performances, city walks, workshops, online interactive programs, and happenings, which revolve around strong action. _ao_ao_ing makes performances that juggles the line between theatre and everyday life and create real happenings that cannot be replicated. Continue reading “Student Report: _ao_ao_ing (老妖精) Working Wonders on DKU Campus”
