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”
What’s up people? We have quietly bid farewell to DKU and Beauty Salon has finished its second installment at DKU, full of surprise and laughter. In the three days of its operation, we gathered at the living room in the name of art. Together we shared our stories, for example, choices of our favorite toilet on campus; we explored the definitions of art; we celebrated the birthday for a girl we just met; we knitted sweaters, played electric guitar, then we left the AB lobby and went to the square in front … Through this process we have understood that such a space for creativity and conviviality is not to be found elsewhere on campus; we have also seen the infinite potential this glass room now called “Beauty Salon” has brought and can bring, moving forward. We are asking: how can you continue to inhabit this artistic project and creative space after the so-called artists have left? Will “Beauty Salon” become an autonomous space continuously created and cared for by everyone, which will become an integral part of the DKU campus? Continue reading “A Quiet Farewell to DKU and Beauty Salon from the Artists in Residence”
