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Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme Research Report

Para/Site Art Space Limited

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Introduction Over the first phase of the Springboard grant of the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme 2011-2013, Para Site has expanded greatly thorough a re-vamp of its visual identity and website, its programming of six exhibitions, eight public programmes and one international conference of high standards. Each exhibition, programme and conference were conceived through looking into a wide scope of international and local research materials that Para Site has been able to tap into and make accessible to the greater Hong Kong public through contributions of our artists and participating collaborators. Though diverse in approach, it reaffirms Para Site’s ongoing commitment to introduce and expand the vocabularies relating to contemporary art practice through the manifestation and communication of curated exhibitions and programmes.

The Springboard Fund has proven to be greatly instrumental in contributing to the successful development of Para Site’s programmes. Despite this being the first time that the Springboard Fund has funded a visual art institution of this nature, we believe that it has been a fruitful endeavor and collaboration that could continue to contribute immensely to the development of the Hong Kong contemporary art scene and its audience. Para Site has established a firm international position through impactful exhibitions with global significance that were seen and reviewed at unprecedented levels beyond geographic boundaries. Our exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story in 2013 received international acclaim, had record-breaking audience numbers and was showcased widely with over 300 press clippings in the local and international press such as CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Hong Kong Economic Journal, South China Morning Post, China Daily, amongst many others—an overwhelming and unprecedented level of exposure for a small art institution. The show was also hailed

by Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the world's leading curators, as "one of the best, most interesting and successful group shows that I have seen internationally these years.”

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Taiping Tianguo Performance Programme Melati Suryodarmo, Xavier Le Roy, Zan Yamashita, Tang Fu Kuen

Melati Suryodarmo, Butter Dance, 2000

Taiping Tianguo Performance Programme took place in the framework of 太平天國 /Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York, on view at Para Site between MayAugust 2012. Having taken place at Spring Workshop and at Para Site Art Space, the programme brought together some of the most influential performance artists and choreographers of today such as Xavier Le Roy (FR), Melati Suryodarmo (IND) and Zan Yamashita (JAP). The programme elaborated on certain issues articulated by the exhibition such as the use of the body as a terrain for artistic practice and the influence of the biographical in the formation of an artist's vernacular. The performance programme was curated by Tang Fu Kuen and was co-produced

by Para Site Art Space and Spring Workshop.

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Xavier Le Roy, Product of Circumstances, 1999 Taiping Tianguo Performance Programme 26 August 2012, Spring Workshop 2 performances and 1 panel discussion Taiping Tianguo Performance Programme 28 August 2012, Para/Site Art Space 1 performance 1 artist talk

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Deimantas Narkevicius – About Films – exhibition (1st Chapter of Research Exhibition) About Films

Sep 15th 2012 to Nov 18th 2012 Deimantas Narkevičius : About Films was the artist's first solo exhibition in Asia. One of the most original voices of his generation, Deimantas Narkevičius explores the process and methods of reflecting both history and subjectivity in the cinematographic language. The exhibition introduced the artist's work through a few moments and methods of his complex practice. Often working with visual archives that appropriate the melancholy implied in the representation of memory and twisting it with various filmic references, Narkevičius creates dialectics of seeing within memory structures. He deals with the archives' limitations, of sometimes eluding the subjective from a given time and place, by creating fictional archival imagery and cinematic narratives. This fictional realm, together with personal memorabilia of found family images or historic TV footage become the field of representation for revisiting life styles, desires, forms of sociability and anxieties of individuals being caught in the long transformation of his society from the repressive Soviet era to a global capitalist country. His stories do not intend to produce illustrations, nor the moralist standpoints with which testimonial cinematographic languages are usually

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connected, but rather dig in the psychology of individuals and in the survival of idiosyncrasies from the socialist age into contemporaneity.

The exhibition was, however, not about films, as much as his practice is not about a self-referential gaze on the medium itself. Deploying a temporality that differs from the economy of the spectacle, it produces an imagery that negotiates the weight of history in relation to biographies that departs from the specificity of socialist Lithuania or global Lithuania, for that matter. The audiences in Hong Kong are familiar, for example, not as much with the marginalization of Laimonas Šiaučiuvėnas in Restricted Sensation (2012) for his sexuality, but rather with the institutionalized language of an oppressive and conformist bureaucracy, and with a lack of humane relationships, either in the character's work place or in the interrogation room. About Films was curated by Cosmin Costinas.

Narkevičius (b. 1964, Utena, Lithuania) is one of the most representative artists of his generation. His solo presentations include Deimantas Narkevičius, BFI Southbank Gallery, London (2009); The Unanimous Life, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008); and The Lithuanian Pavillion, the 49th Venice Biennial, Venice (2001). He has participated in exhibitions such as Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011); What Keeps Mankind Alive?, the 11th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2009); and The Viewer's Dictatorship, the 50th Venice Biennial, Venice (2003).

15 September 2012 Para/Site Art Space Para/Site Art Space

1 artist talk 1 exhibition

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Manuel Raeder: On Narratives

Sep 18th 2012 MANUEL RAEDER of Studio Manuel Raeder elaborated on his practice and concerns about construction of narratives, in the form of books, exhibition design and furniture. He sees books as carriers of information, or experimental devices to document or conceive narratives. Likewise, exhibition design can evolve in different sensorial experiences, thus leading the visitor through a spatial narrative.

Studio Manuel Raeder is an interdisciplinary design studio based in Berlin, that has been engaged in designing, publishing and editing over 100 artist books in the past ten years, as well as being responsible for the communication strategies and graphic identity of several cultural institutions such as Kölnischer Kusntverein (2007 - 2011), Kunstverein München (since 2010), and Artists Space New York (since 2009), and of the fashion label BLESS (since BLESS N° 23). The studio has developed long standing collaborations with artists such as Eran Schaerf, Mariana Castillo Deball, Haegue Yang, Nora Schultz, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sergej Jensen and the Berlin based gallery, Galerie Neu. In 2011, together with Manuel Goller, Raeder founded the artist publishing house BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. 18 September, 2012 19:00hrs Venue: “A Space”, Asia Art Archive 10/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

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Para Site Reading Group 6 October 2012

The initial four sessions were conceived collaboratively by Para Site Curator Qinyi Lim, artists Nadim Abbas and Magdalen Wong.

Location: Para Site Art Space, G/F, 4 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Dates: Tuesday, 16 October Tuesday, 13 November Tuesday, 18 December Tuesday, 15 January Each section started at 20.00hr

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Paradox of Choice in a Time of Anxiety (2nd Chapter of Research Exhibition)

Sun Xun, Some Actions Which Haven't Been Defined Yet in the Revolution, 2011.

1 December - 2012 to 17 February, 2013, Para Site Art Space Dec 1st 2012 to Feb 17th 2013 Adam Curtis Michael Lee Sun Xun Tang Kwok Hin Curated by Qinyi Lim 2012 marked the slow recovery of consumer confidence index in Hong Kong since the extreme dip in the latter half of 2011. While pundits have cited 2011 as the second lowest level of this index since the 2008 financial crisis, the recovery of Hong Kong’s consumer market seemed markedly cautious in its move from a pessimistic to neutral outlook. Though this surge was propelled mainly by the public’s trust in stable employment, the positivity was, in contrast, conveyed with hesitancy in sectors such as quality of life, the stock market and the economy.

The rise of consumption and the belief in unlimited growth and progress in contemporary post-industrial capitalist cities such as Hong Kong, is often followed shortly by the re-emergence of the ideology of Choice. Herein, Choice is seen as packaged in mainstream discussions of enhancement and self-improvement such as skin whitening, obesity and slimming paid editorials, where the acts of simplifying life and the search for contentment becomes another version of choice and paradoxically, anxiety.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? took its name from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel and proposed to read Anxiety as the signal and expectation of danger in the everyday rather than a phobia of a specific subject. This state of mind also arises out of a changed perception that one has of themselves, and in direct relation to societal changes at large. The exhibition seeked to explore the condition as it is enmeshed

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within today’s society, with a particular attention towards the new feeling of inadequacy perpetuated by the nature of contemporary capitalism. It explored the causation, occurrences, inner mechanisms, politics and functions of Anxiety in relation to the development of consumerism in cities like Hong Kong, through the practice of the four participating artists.

Artist talks took place on 1 December 2012 at Para Site with participating artists Michael Lee, Sun Xun and Tang Kwok Hin. Artist talks Date: 1 December, 2012 Time: 3:00pm Venue: Para Site Art Space, G/F, 4 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan Artists' Biographies Adam Curtis (b. 1955, United Kingdom) is a documentary filmmaker and journalist.

He works for BBC television in London and formerly taught Politics at Oxford University. His films have won many awards―including six BAFTAs. His series The Power of Nightmares was invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 2005.

Curtis also writes multi-media political and cultural essays on a BBC website using longer sections of film from the archives―www.bbc.co.uk/adamcurtis. His solo exhibition The Desperate Edge of Now was curated by Hans Ulrich Olbrist at e-flux, New York, in 2012.

Michael Lee (b. 1972, Singapore) is an artist and curator based in Berlin, Germany and Singapore. Lee graduated with Masters and Bachelor of Communication Studies from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2001 and 1997 respectively. He researches urban memory and fiction, especially the contexts and implications of loss. Through his research, Lee transforms his observations into objects, diagrams, situations, curations or essays. Past exhibitions include Mtrospective: Michael Lee's First Decade 2001-2011, Studio Bibliothèque, Singapore in 2012; Michael Lee, Chan Hampe Galleries @ Art Stage Singapore, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore in 2011; Lost City and Other Stories, Hanart Square and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong in 2010 and A Psychotaxonomy of Home, Baba House, Singapore in 2008. His group exhibitions include the 3rd Kuandu Biennale in 2012, 2nd Asia Triennial Manchester in 2011, the 3rd Singapore Biennale in 2011, and the 8th Shanghai Biennale 2010. He is currently a resident artist at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he will stage a solo exhibition in February 2013.

Sun Xun (b. 1980, China) creates animations that combine hand-drawn renderings and traditional materials with new media. He studied printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts, but a burgeoning interest in moving images led him to found his own animation studio in 2006. To create his meticulous animations, Sun Xun produces a multitude of drawings that incorporate text within the image. His subjects range from elements found in world history and politics, to natural organisms. He then films the drawings, sequentially one at a time, to create a sense of movement and suggest the passing of time, the machinations of history, and the beauty inherent

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in simple forms. His work has been screened at numerous festivals, including the 2007 Torino Film Festival, and has been shown in exhibitions at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and at ShanghART, among other venues. Sun also participated in Death And Life of Fiction, Taipei Biennale in 2012.

Tang Kwok Hin (b.1983, Hong Kong) is a mixed media artist and independent curator based in Hong Kong. He received his Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) and Master of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Tang focuses on the occasion, space, time and way of encountering images or symbols to explore hidden rules in living and existing contexts for self-expression. Past exhibitions include Gelassenheit: Letting It Be, 2P Contemporary Art Gallery, Hong Kong and I call you Nancy, Amelia Johnson Contemporary, Hong Kong in 2012; Octopus, Hanina, Tei-Aviv, Israel and The 2nd Chongqing Biennalefor Young Artists, The Art Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China in 2011; PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, Ice Palace, Miami, US in 2009.

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Para Site Website Revamp

By Studio Manuel Raeder, Berlin

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It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve

Installation View Mar 9th 2013 to Apr 28th 2013 Philippe Grandrieux, Lü Yue, Masao Adachi, Patrizio di Massimo, Mladen Stilinović Curated by Cosmin Costinas

It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve was a group exhibition featuring works by Philippe Grandrieux, Lü Yue, Masao Adachi, Patrizio di Massimo and Mladen Stilinović. It brought together art pieces, films and biographies in which the artists' individual gestures, positions, statements, counter-manifestos, silences and escapisms shared a certain tension about art's uncertain intersection with the present.

In Lü Yue's feature film The Obscure, a group of prominent Chinese writers of the same post-cultural revolution generation gather in a provincial hotel to discuss at length (defying both the fast-paced temporality of our time and every convention on the viewer's attention span in mainstream cinema) their views on the place of poetics in contemporary China. The intellectuals take their time to visit various issues connected to China's massive transformation over the last decades, with all its implications for history and the individual, for society and for art, from the most obvious to the most obscure. But what could have been a self-serving illustration of an exercise in artistic withdrawal is unsettled by the unexpected introduction of fiction and the personal in the detached, documentary style of the piece. In a different manner, Philippe Grandrieux's portrait of Japanese film maker and revolutionary Masao Adachi (the source of the exhibition's name) is centered around the exploration of Adachi's inner self and avoids thus to be an exercise of melancholy

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on the ruins of the international left. Active in Japan’s avant-garde film scene of the 1960s and a member of the Japanese Red Army, Masao Adachi provides a deeply moving introspection of a life lived mostly outside mainstream society (he was exiled in Lebanon for more than two decades) and with firm beliefs on art's possibilities. The decision to not enter the production logics of the art system is to be read in Mladen Stilinović's 1993 manifesto "The Praise of Laziness". His 'laziness' (augmented by the images of him sleeping in the 1978 piece "Artist at work") is in fact an active process of critical statements about art and the self-perpetuating bureaucracy around it, both under the socialist and the capitalist systems. Patrizio di Massimo's series of portraits of various characters, ranging in style from a fantastical realist painting to lush abstract velvet curtains bring to the foreground of the exhibition artistic subjectivity as a dominant specter in the crafting of artistic vocabularies. Desire (inconspicuous in the prudish panorama of today's art) insinuates itself at every fold in the piece and completes the exhibition's narrative.

Artist talks took place on 9 March, from 15h at Para Site.

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Art and violence in times of tyranny of choice Lecture by Renata Salecl Saturday, 23 March 2013, 15 - 17 hrs, Spring Workshop.

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Saturday, 23 March 2013, 15 - 17 hrs, Spring Workshop.

Art and violence in times of tyranny of choice was a lecture by renowned philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl. The lecture focused on her ongoing research on the tyranny of choice and the sources of anxiety in contemporary society. Salecl's preposition is that the constant apparent freedom of numerous choices at every new step in life is an oppressive reality for the contemporary individual. In these conditions, one tends to experience an increase in anxiety and feelings of guilt when faced with the prospect of failing in life - which is now understood as nothing more than the sum of consequences of all of one's choices. This in turn causes aggression towards oneself and apathy in relation to contemporary social problems which are completely ignored by the emporium of individualist choices. Salecl also discussed how these new anxieties are reflected through the lens of contemporary art.

Art and violence in times of tyranny of choice was a parallel event to the exhibition Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Paradox of Choice in a Time of Anxiety.

Renata Salecl (b. 1962, Slovenia) is senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is also professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London and recurring visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law. Her books include: The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism, (Per)versions of Love and Hate, On Anxiety, and The Tyranny of Choice. Her books have been translated into ten languages. In Chinese language, the translation includes (Per)version of Love and Hate, as well as Tyranny of Choice. Renata Salecl also writes on contemporary art and is one the board of the museum of modern and contemporary art in Ljubljana.

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PARA SITE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2013 Apr 11th 2013 to Apr 13th 2013 The Jockey Club Hall, Asia Society 9 Justice Drive Admiralty, Hong Kong

Erika Tan, Sensing Obscurity III: ‘After’ Chinoiserie, 2011. Still from single-channel HDV. A collaborative work with Neil Rose. Courtesy the artist.

Para Site International Conference 2013 was a three-day forum that brought together a group of original thinkers, artists and curators from around the world to discuss and navigate on the spectral contemporary condition of art. The conference presented different contextual genealogies, realities of production and interpretative vocabularies and allowed for their reading from the perspective of Hong Kong and its changing position in the globalized contemporary art field.

The International Conference 2013 was premised on a need to rethink the basis of international solidarity, with a special attention to the field of contemporary art, to the means it still has and the needs it now has, after the end of its phase of rapid global institutional expansion. The conference also reviewed a number of case studies of artistic practices in given contexts, looking closer at artistic forms and vocabularies and their complicated relationship to the historical circumstances that generate them and which they try to address.

The conference was thus organized around two broad thematic fields. On 11 and 12 April, “New internationalisms after multiculturalism/Contemporary art after global expansion” featured Charles Merewether (art historian, writer, Director of Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, and curator of the Biennale of Sydney 2004; Singapore), Hammad Nasar (curator, writer and Head of Research and Programmes

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at Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong), Ruth Noack (art historian, writer, Head of Department of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College of Art, and curator of Documenta 12; London and Berlin), Erika Tan (artist, curator, writer, and researcher; London), Georg Schöllhammer (writer, researcher, independent curator, and editorin-chief of springerin and documenta 12 magazines; Vienna), David Teh (curator, writer, academic, director of Future Perfect; Singapore), and Yeung Yang (curator, writer and founder of soundpocket; Hong Kong).

On 12 and 13 April, “Determinisms in art vocabularies and interactions between art and politics in specific historical conditions” included contributions by Nadim Abbas (artist and musician; Hong Kong), Petra Bauer (artist and filmmaker; Stockholm), FX Harsono (art critic, artist and founding member of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru; Jakarta), Max Jorge Hinderer (writer, researcher, cultural critic, curator of The Potosi Principle; Berlin), Ana Janevski (art critic, writer and Associate Curator, MoMA; New York), Hsu Ming-han (art and film critic, curator, chief editor of Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei? and co-founder of Gaze – Contemporary Art Online Magazine; Taipei), Rabih Mroue (actor, playwright, director and artist; Beirut and Berlin), Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (writer, researcher and curator at National University of Singapore Museum; Singapore), Marc Siegel (writer, researcher and co-founder of the art collective CHEAP; Berlin), Enin Supriyanto (writer, editor and independent curator; Jakarta), and Anthony Yung (writer, curator, researcher at Asia Art Archive and co-founder of Observation Society, Guangzhou; Hong Kong).

The conference was free of charge to the public. Live streaming was available at www.para-site.org.hk.

The International Conference 2013 is a Para Site project, which was co-presented by Asia Society, Hong Kong.

Programme: New internationalisms after multiculturalism Contemporary art after global expansion 11 April, Thursday 1500 – 1515 Introduction by Cosmin Costinas 1515 – 1600 The Best Start is Art, Ruth Noack (art historian, writer and Head of Programme, Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London and curator of Documenta 12; London and Berlin) 1600 – 1645 THE PRETERNATIONAL: the contemporary and its treacherous vocabularies ,David Teh (curator, writer, academic, director of Future Perfect; Singapore) 1645 – 1700 Coffee Break 1700 – 1745 Except for Clive Owens’ Hollywood International, the international does not have a face. But is it inevitably an adjective?, Yeung Yang (curator, writer and founder of soundpocket; Hong Kong)

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1745 – 1900 Oriental Rift, Erika Tan (artist, curator, writer, and researcher; London), hosted by Qinyi Lim 1900 – 1915 Q&A 12 April, Friday 1400 – 1445 Becoming or Beyond the 'Global Offshore', Charles Merewether (art historian, writer, Director of Institute of Contemporary Arts, gapore, and curator of the Biennale of Sydney 2004; Singapore) 1445 –1530 Treacherous Terrains: Slippages in notions of art and nation in a networked world, Hammad Nasar (curator, writer and Head of Research and Programmes at Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong) 1530 – 1545 Coffee Break 1545 – 1700 Plenary Session 1700 – 1715 Coffee Break Determinisms in art vocabularies and interaction between art and politics in specific historical conditions 12 April, Friday 1715 - 1800 The Extended Economy of the Sensible. Two Examples: The Colonial Baroque Paintings of Potosí and the Pharmacologies of Enlightenment, Max Jorge Hinderer (writer, researcher, cultural critic, curator of The Potosi Principle; Berlin) 1800 - 1845 Semblance/Presence: Notes From an Art Project, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (writer, researcher and curator at National University of Singapore Museum; Singapore) 1845 – 1930 This is not a game: On performance, dance and live arts within the institutional framework, Ana Janevski (art critic, writer and Associate Curator, MoMA; New York) 1930 – 1945 Q&A 13 April, Saturday 1100 – 1145 From socialist realism to extreme autonomy - Chinese art from 1977 to 1989, Anthony Yung (writer, curator, researcher at Asia Art Archive and co-founder of Observation Society, Guangzhou; Hong Kong) 1145 – 1230 Southall Black Sisters and Tensta Women's Centre - through aesthetic strategies, on the power of everyday communities in a Northern European context, Petra Bauer (artist and filmmaker; Stockholm)

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1330 – 1415 Lost to Vision Altogether, Believing It Can Be Otherwise, Marc Siegel (writer, researcher and co-founder of the art collective CHEAP; Berlin) 1415 – 1500 The absence of Ai Weiwei and the presence of artwork in Taiwan: On Ai Weiwei's Passive Initiative, Hsu Ming-han (art and film critic, curator, chief editor of Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei? and co- founder of Gaze– Contemporary Art Online Magazine; Taipei) 1500 – 1510

Video intervention by Rabih Mroué

1510 – 1525

Coffee Break

1525 – 1610 Superficial Engagements: how Art attempts to channel the critical agency of Poor Images in an age of Social Media, Nadim Abbas (artist and musician; Hong Kong) 1610 – 1725

Artist talk by Fx Harsono, hosted by Enin Supriyanto

1725 – 1740

Coffee Break

1740 – 1900

Plenary Session

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A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story

Lam Qua, Portrait no 48.Yang Kang, 1830-1850. Oil painting. Courtesy Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

Opening: 16 May 2013, 19:00–21:00 hrs 17 May–20 July at Para Site 17 May–26 May at a private flat, 5/F, 30 Queen Street, Sheung Wan 17 May–26 May at Sheung Wan Civic Centre Exhibition Hall, 6/F, Sheung Wan Municipal Services Building, 345 Queen's Road Central, Sheung Wan Ai Weiwei Bernd Behr Natalia Sui-hung Chan Oscar Chan Yik Long Yin-Ju Chen George Chinnery Megan Cope Dung Kai-cheung Larry Feign James T. Hong Irene Kopelman Firenze Lai Lam Qua Lee Kit Len Lye Ma Liuming Fionnuala McHugh Moe Satt Pak Sheung Chuen Para/Site Art Criticism Class 2003 Lygia Pape Apichatpong Weerasethakul Adrian Wong Ming Wong Ricky Yeung Sau-churk Samson Young Mathias Woo & Edward Lam / Zuni Icosahedron A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story started from the events that affected Hong Kong in the spring of 2003 and traced the different narratives, historical backgrounds as well as the implications of these events in relation to the contemporary culture and politics of Hong Kong and the world.

The city has a subjectively internalised history of epidemics and of representations in the colonial era as an infected land that needed to be conquered from nature, disease and oriental habits in order to be made healthy, modern and profitable.

These narratives culminated with the identification of the bacillus causing the plague

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during an epidemic in Hong Kong in 1894, in Para Site's current neighbourhood. This discovery contributed to a dubious association of the disease with Asia and heightened the "yellow peril" scares in Europe and America at the time. In Hong Kong, the fear of infecting agents has always resonated with a fear of other people, quarantine has mirrored exclusion, whilst epidemiological, racial and cultural contamination have shared the same language.

When the city became the epicenter of the most significant airborne epidemic in recent years - the SARS crisis of 2003 - the unparalleled shutdown of the city and the atomisation of society in quarantined segments led to an unexpected shift in the political awareness of the Hong Kong citizenry. Just after the end of the epidemic, record numbers of people turned out to protest against a new internal security law imposed by Beijing, causing its shelving and, more importantly, the emergence of an active political community. After that moment, the image of a de-politicised and soullessly pragmatic commercial hub could not anymore tell the whole story about Hong Kong.

Installation view of the exhibition Less gloriously however, the main measure taken to alleviate the economic meltdown caused by SARS, the option for Mainland citizens to visit the territory for the first time on individual visas caused another major shift in the identity of the city, and its relationship to Mainland China. Medicalised vocabularies and imageries reminiscent of epidemics have been used in regard to the growing number of Mainland Chinese in Hong Kong, seen as pathogens corrupting an otherwise healthy social body and as milk formula sucking locusts. Again, an epidemic becomes the backdrop of paranoia and hate, but the fear of the Chinese, of their vast numbers and uncivilized habits, is now harboured by fellow Chinese rather than by the self-content Europeans of the last plague visitation a century ago. This essentialising xenophobia has come to be a defining factor in the relationship between the two sides of the Shenzhen River, and paradoxically has complicated the pro-democracy (and antiBeijing) discourse and activism, rejuvenated in the wake of the SARS crisis.

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These ambivalences in the identity of Hongkongers are reflected in the figure of Leslie Cheung, the hugely iconic figure, actor and singer who committed suicide at the height of the SARS crisis by jumping off the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Central Hong Kong. His shocking death at the darkest hour of the darkest times in recent memory played its part in the mobilisation of Hongkongers, who turned out in huge numbers for Leslie's funeral, ignoring the health warnings in effect at the time. Gor Gor's ("Big Brother" in Cantonese - as Leslie has been known) life and career have contributed to forging a strong sense of identity for Hong Kong culture, in spite of his queer and often contrarian persona. The versatility of the roles he played reflected (and arguably enhanced) the versatility of the city's identity over the past decades, before and after the handover. And his ghostly presence continues to do so.

The exhibition navigated through these disparate though interconnected narratives and contributed to a critical discussion about Hong Kong's recent history with the help of works by local and international artists, as well as of pop cultural artifacts and archival documents. It was curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero.

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Lygia Pape, Divisor

Lygia Pape, Divisor , 1968.

Friday, 17 May 2013 at Chater Road, Central, 15:00–17:00 hrs
 Saturday, Lygia Pape was part of the generation of artists who founded the Neo-concrete movement in Brazil, an experimental moment of constructivism and geometric abstract art, which manifested in South America in the late 1950's. Neoconcretist artists like Pape sought to explore ideas of colour and form in relation to the sensorial cartography of the individual and the collective.

The work Divisor was originally performed on the streets of Rio de Janeiro in 1968. It is composed of an immense white fabric, which can be seen as a large scale white monochrome and is activated by a participative audience. The only visible part of each participant is their head, piercing through the fabric, whilst their hidden bodies jointly move along public space. The amorphous mutant forms created throughout the piece reflect the subjectivity of the participants who struggle between individualism and solidarity with the collective experience.

Having been performed at the artist's latest retrospective in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Divisor was being reenacted for the first time in Asia at two locations in Hong Kong as part of the exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero.

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The Floating Eternity Project 15 September – 10 November 2013 Opening: 14 September 2013, 19.00–21.00hrs

Public Programmes 15 September, 15.00-16.30 hrs Hong-Kai Wang, Terrestrial Excursions, sound performance In collaboration with Yong-Chih Chang, Steve Hui, Miu-Ling Lam and Samson Young Spring Workshop, 3F, 42 Wang Chuk Hang Road Film screenings at Para Site, co-curated with Venus Lau 5 & 19 October Para Site proudly presents The Floating Eternity Project, a group exhibition featuring Adam Bobbette & Seth Denizen, BREAD Studio, Moosje M. Goosen, Grieve Perspective, Ho Sin Tung, The Estate of Charles LaBelle, Venus Lau, Maha Maamoun, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, and Hong-Kai Wang.

The Floating Eternity Project took its point of departure from a 2012 architectural proposal by BREAD Studio to create an offshore columbarium to alleviate the pressing concerns over Hong Kong’s critical land scarcity and greying population as well as the implications of these issues on the city’s economy of the afterlife. Taking into account Hong Kong’s belief systems, BREAD Studio conceived of a temporary platform that would contain over 350,000 niches of equal auspiciousness for individual human remains, vital to the concerns of the Chinese fengshui tradition and

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at an affordable price. This columbarium was planned to be anchored in the outer waters of Hong Kong and to return to the shore when needed.

Through newly commissioned and existing architectural proposals, texts, videos and installations by Hong Kong and international artists, the exhibition explored notions of land scarcity, private and public spaces attributed to the living and the dead, and the formation of memory landscapes. The latter was informed by the traditions of death and mourning such as the Hungry Ghost Festival and the history of graveyards and burial rituals in Hong Kong. This history ranges from the establishment of the first unauthorized Chinese burial site on Cemetery Street (now Po Yan Street, on which Para Site is situated) in 1850 to the pivotal role Hong Kong played in facilitating the return of remains of members of past Chinese diasporas through institutions such as the Tung Wah Coffin Home from the late 19th century to the present. The Floating Eternity Project was curated by Qinyi Lim. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of public programmes. These included film screenings at Para Site exploring memory formation and space, as well as the representation of specters and the supernatural in Hong Kong film culture (on 5 October and 19 October 2013), co-curated with Venus Lau; a sound performance by artist Hong-Kai Wang, Terrestrial Excursions at Spring Workshop on 15 September, 15.00 hrs. The sound performance, Terrestrial Excursions, will use conversation as a mechanism to explore the process and technology of reminiscence. Starting in Taipei, Wang recorded an exchange between herself and Taiwanese composer Yong-Chih Chang discussing their memories of Ching Ming day - a tradition linked with tomb sweeping. Based on the transcription of the exchange, actors and collaborators Steve Hui, Miu-Ling Lam and Samson Young were invited to re-enact the conversation and intervene as a way of revealing to the audience the process of unfolding memories in a language shaped by circumstance and context.

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GREAT CRESCENT: ART AND AGITATION IN THE 1960s—JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA, AND TAIWAN 22 November 2013 – 9 February 2014 Opening: 21 November, 19–21h

Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. A small essay of comparative art history, this exhibition highlighted “anti-art” performative tendencies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1960s—a decade of turbulence and transformation worldwide, which was also a critical period in the social and political, as well as cultural and artistic histories of the three neighboring countries. Against the mainstream dominated by modernist abstraction in each country, orientations toward the use of the artist’s body and ephemeral action emerged not only as local manifestations of a broader movement in international postwar art but also as indigenous responses to their respective national contexts. Great Crescent included many reproductions of documentary images of immaterial, if critical, performances and events, accompanied by textual narratives and printed matters.

Artists include: Chang Chao-Tang, Choi Boong-hyun, Chuang Ling, Hi Red Center, Huang Huacheng, Jeong Gang-ja, Kang Guk-jin, Yoko Ono, and Zero Dimension. The exhibition’s staging is developed together with Hong Kong-based artist Leung Chi Wo. Rather than presenting a comprehensive statement on the topic, this selection of works made a small contribution to the budding research and study on the history of avant-garde performance in East Asia. It intends to show parallels without apparent connections as well as startling resonances between the three artistic scenes, despite a lack of communication and exchange between the countries due to colonial legacy and ideological divides. Taiwan and Korea, annexed by Japan in 1895 and in 1910 respectively, gained independence in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II but soon found themselves in a stand-off with the Communist

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strongholds of North Korea and People’s Republic of China. It was during the colonial period that both Taiwan and Korea underwent the first stage of modernization under Japanese directives, and the birth of modern art in each location, in large part, took place under Japanese tutelage. After the war, the reconstructions of the three nations were intricately linked to the American presence and interest in the region; after the occupation by Americanled allied forces following the defeat in the war, Japan was transformed into a demilitarized, constitutionally pacifist nation, and at the same time the main anchor in the American plan for the containment of communism in Northeast Asia, while South Korea and Taiwan became US’s strategic frontline bases. Linked together, the three nations formed a geopolitical and military bulwark against the Communist expansion in the region—the so-called Great Crescent. Each country’s forced relationship with the US also meant that its art scene was affected, if rather haphazardly and incompletely, by the influx of information on American art as well as European art. Inspired by new experiments in art in the West and critical of the American interference in their countries, younger artists emerging in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1960s began exploring the possibilities of using their art to respond directly to the increasingly bureaucratic and conventionalized art scene as well as their realities marked by political instability and restrictions on freedom of expression.

A small group of pioneering art historians and curators has begun to tell the histories of performance and experimental art in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Relying on their important work, the exhibition Great Crescent proposed a transnational and interregional look at this complicated and long-overlooked topic.

Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan was coorganized by Para Site and the curatorial initiative A Future Museum for China, with Lesley Ma. Artist talk with Taiwanese artist Chuang Ling and his collaborator Chen Hsia-Sheng, and the screening of Chuang’s two films Life Continued (1966) and My Newborn Baby (1967) were held at A Space, Asia Art Archive, (Room 1001, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong) on 23 November 2013, 15.00hr.

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