Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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November 2021

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi: I thought we could start with something personal. One of the points of connection I have observed throughout our conversations over the last months is our relationship to our mothers.

Wong Binghao: Yes, we just realized that last week was both of our mothers’ birthdays.

THNC: Yes, that’s such a sweet coincidence.

WBH: Could you tell me more about the new video that you’re making in collaboration with your mother about her life experiences, among other things?

THNC: I actually just finished the script, but the project is still in its embryonic stage. So I can’t share anything concrete yet, but I can talk about the various conditions that may have brought this project, which is part of a trilogy I began working on in 2016, into existence. The In/Extinguishable Fire (2019), the second part of the trilogy, opens with this image: An unidentifiable figure stands alone at the beach at night in Hội An, Vietnam, illuminating the waves with a torch in search of something unknown to both themself and the viewer. I decided to shoot this opening scene at that particular location after an encounter in December eight years ago. On that hot and humid afternoon, I was sitting with B—an essayist, political activist, and philosophy professor—in his office, listening to him speak about his youth and adulthood, the things that moved and shaped him, from the period of French colonialism to American imperialism to present-day Vietnam. He told me he began speaking French in elementary school, and how deeply he was influenced by French culture and literature. He told me how his thoughts on freedom [tư tưởng về tự do], paradoxically, were nurtured by the very education that was meant to colonize him. He told me that he was a member of the anti-French resistance youth group in the 1950s and once attempted to burn down a French school. He organized Central Highland tribes into guerrilla units to fight the French. He told me about the first time he saw the corpse of a friend. I was shaken to the core when I left his office after three hours of conversation. I was so moved by his presence, his actions, his experiences, and the idea of a colonizing tool being transformed into a tool of liberation. Later that week, I went for a night walk with him on the beach in Hội An. We walked in silence for a long time until we stopped to observe the movements of the dark waves. After a while, he said something like, “Whenever I look at the ocean, I think of all the corpses lying on the ocean bed. I was not brave enough to flee this country. They died and I survived.”

A few years later, again in December, I was sitting next to my mother in the darkness of the cinema, when I witnessed her being overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea as rays of light entered her eyes. She was looking at an image of a spaceship moving through a wormhole, when she told me, “It reminds me so much of being on a boat when I escaped Vietnam.” In the film being screened, the protagonist goes on an interplanetary odyssey in search of a habitable planet necessitated by an impending apocalypse on Earth. In that moment, the collision between memory and cinema created some kind of wormhole through which her present mind/body traveled. I realized that a work of science fiction and speculative futurism has the potential to activate archives experienced as somatized trauma—memories of the future. 

Speaking of memories, a moving image that has haunted me since I was a teenager is the image of a jump, although—or because—it is an image I have never seen but have only imagined. After stepping onto a fishing boat in Long Xuyên in the spring of 1979, my mother spent three days floating across the South China Sea. She was without food for three days because the mung bean cubes and citrus fruits she had brought along were stolen. Three days of talking to the captain to keep him awake. Three days of taking care of those who were feeling sick. Three days of looking at the celestial sphere every night with a sense of wonder, with a sense of uncertainty. Three days of oscillating between possible freedom and possible death. On the third day, they were accompanied by a pod of dolphins while approaching Songkhla, Thailand. On the third day, death possibly equaled freedom, my mother—who, back then, was not able to swim—decided to jump into the ocean. I won’t elaborate on the circumstances here, but you will understand once you see the film in a few months.

The idea of freedom really intrigues me because of how B uses the term within the context of anti-colonial resistance and because of how my mother uses it when she recounts her escape, specifically in the moment she jumped, surrendering to death. I’m not interested in the liberal discourse of freedom¹—I’m searching for a different conceptualization of freedom, one that includes a recasting of freedom in refugitude², but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. A few years ago, I came across this set of questions in Hélène Cixous’s essay “We Who Are Free, Are We Free?”³ which really resonated with me: “What am I in relation to freedom?⁴ What are we? What are you? Am I free? Have I ever been free? Have we? Have you? Where is freedom to be found, where does liberty find refuge when it is under threat?”⁵ And I like to think about these questions in relation to this particular imaginary that Angela Davis addressed during a conversation with Toni Morrison: “How do we think about freedom? It is about the deeply historical character of our own imaginings of what it means to be free… Because I think we won’t ever reach a point where we can say, ‘We are free.’ It seems that in the very process of struggling for, reflecting on, and writing about freedom, we constantly challenge the framework, within which we develop that imaginary of freedom.”⁶—the imaginary of freedom is continuously metamorphosing as it moves through time and space! I wonder what this imaginary meant for our grandmothers and mothers, what it means for you and me now, what it will mean for generations to come, and how these imaginaries, conditioned by various personal, political, cultural, historical conditions and contexts, generate different meanings when you reflect on them in relation to each other. 

I’m really fascinated by our imaginaries of freedom and of death, by the potential entanglement between these imaginaries and how they shape us. On another level, I’m also preoccupied with the death/birth of a perception, an imaginary, a narrative, an image of a self; and experimenting with memory, imagination, performance, and moving images is my attempt to think and live through these questions.

November 2022

WBH: The film titled Into The Violet Belly (2022), commissioned by the 12th Berlin Biennale, curated by Kader Attia, has been completed. Picking up from our earlier conversation, Han describes the centrality of breath and the act of breathing to the film.

THNC: Some years ago, I was in a car on the highway to Munich with my mother and her friend when an immense force moved my body forward and cloudy smoke emerged from within the car. Lying on the car floor, I was suffocating and desperately gasped for air. Later on, in the hospital, I learned that my lung was ruptured and bleeding. I experienced weeks of breathlessness following the car crash. I was dependent on an oxygen mask and a breathing exerciser until I regained full lung capacity. During this period, I spent most of my time practising and contemplating the act of breathing—the conditions that create the im/possibility to breathe. And I began to ask myself: How can I find ways to tune into the collective breath/lessness through my own individual breath/lessness, and vice versa?

This project was very much anchored in the notions of respiration and embodiment. During the film shooting, my mother and I performed the jump multiple times. First, she recalled her memories of the moments before the jump; her emotions, and the conditions that led to her decision to jump. Then she demonstrated the jump to me. When she emerged from the water and climbed back into the boat, I jumped into the water based on her instructions. She gave me directions on where to turn my gaze before the jump—to turn it toward an imaginary person—how to shift my body, how to step to the edge of the boat with one foot, and how to enter the water with my feet first. She emphasized that she didn’t jump headfirst into the water as she didn’t yet know how to swim. We performed—I consciously use the term “performance” and not “reenactment” here because I think that it is impossible to reenact the past—this jump again and again.

During the editing process, our editor Liyo Gong intercut footage of our jumping bodies into one synchronized movement, which was repeated seven times with variations. I wanted to interweave the movement of her body with the movement of my body—two bodies that have existed in an environment where it was difficult, if not impossible, to breathe; bodies that condense all the events that have happened, are happening, will happen—to the point where you can no longer clearly perceive the identities of these bodies, where you can no longer make a clear distinction between director and performer. My mother and I then watched this edited footage projected onto the screen in the post-production studio and reflected on what we saw, felt, thought. There is one sentence during these moments of reflection that she repeated in every variation of her story of being underwater that I left out in the final edit of Into The Violet Belly: “How was I able to open my eyes and see underwater like that? I was not suffocating at all. I felt like a marine mammal.” The fact that she could breathe underwater is surreal, somehow—

WBH: Miraculous.

THNC: Exactly. She always says it was “supernatural” that she could breathe underwater! And I imagine it as a moment where reality and fiction collapse into one another. Perhaps we can address these terms later—I’m digressing now, but do you know that whales evolved from a terrestrial ancestor and made a gradual transition from land to sea in the early Eocene?⁷ During the first lockdown, I spent quite some time reading papers about the evolution of whales.⁸ It was mind-blowing to read about the major changes in multiple physiological functions required for them to move from being terrestrial to semiaquatic to fully aquatic. Whales continue to breathe air using lungs and nurse with mammary glands, as land mammals do.⁹ But the lung capacities of marine mammals are larger than terrestrial mammals, especially when compared on a lean-weight basis. When diving, marine mammals can supplement body oxygen stores by increasing the oxygen storage capacity of the lung, blood, and muscles.¹⁰

So when writing the last scenes of the script and conjuring the images of this jump in my mind, I began to imagine a woman completely surrendering to death/life, to the ocean, putting aside her anthropoid ways,¹¹ and gradually metamorphosing into a marine mammal¹² capable of seeing and “breathing”¹³ underwater. I imagine my mother encountering and turning into her human and more-than-human ancestors underwater. I imagine her migrating from land to sea within three days, three weeks, three months, three years, three decades, three centuries, three millennia, thirty thousand years, three hundred thousand years, three million years, thirty million years. I imagine millions of human and more-than-human beings migrating from land to sea to land at this very moment. I remember twenty-six-year-old Phạm Thị Trà My migrating from land to land to land, stuck in a truck with thirty-eight other young people when she sent a text message to her parents in the final moments of her life—a message that they received when her mobile phone found a signal again, long after all the occupants of the truck had taken their last breath: “Mom and Dad, I’m so sorry. I didn’t make it. Mom. I love you both. I’m dying because I can’t breathe. Mom, I’m so sorry.”¹⁴ I imagine an environment where humans and more-than-human entities are given the possibility to expand their lung capacities and are liberated from the conditions that suffocate them. I imagine freedom of movement for all living beings, and the dissolution of borders between land and land, land and sea, sea and sea; of membranes between humans and humans, humans and more-than-humans; of the boundaries between where you begin and where I end. I imagine us speaking to each other, like whales speak to other whales, in a language of abstruse mathematical poetry.¹⁵ I imagine the collapse of sky and earth, of space and time, of self and self, and the evolution of beings, languages, images, and worlds we are incapable of imagining.

But whenever I look at the ocean, I think of all the corpses lying on the ocean bed, I become aware of the thousands, the millions of migrants at sea whose lungs were not prepared to breathe in an aquatic environment, whose voices are inaudible to us. When a human being drowns, “liquid enters their airways and prevents them from breathing. Submerged in water, one’s breath can be held voluntarily for some time, but without the ability to take in oxygen and to eliminate carbon dioxide, uncontrolled muscular contractions of the vocal folds ensue. One then experiences circulatory arrest, multiple organ dysfunction, and in the absence of rapid intervention and resuscitation, death.”¹⁶

For the animation scene—the penultimate scene in my film, where we see a close-up of the protagonist’s face underwater—I worked with the artist Dalena Tran. Our point of departure was the image of a human lung transforming into a whale lung capable of breathing underwater. After having intense conversations with Dalena about our family’s histories and questions in relation to, but also beyond this project, over several months, she created an organism, a movement, a metamorphosis that is much more complex, open, multi-layered, and dimensional. It is amorphous. It embodies something I tentatively call an aesthetic of uncertainty.

Beyond thinking about breathing merely in its biological aspect, I’m also reminded of an essay by Achille Mbembe in which he conceives of breathing as that which “we all hold in common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation”: the universal right to breathe¹⁷—a right that has been violated by the conditions and forces of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. There is a paragraph in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where he writes about the anti-French resistance during French colonialism in Vietnam: “It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because ‘quite simply’ it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe… It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die.”¹⁸ What could resistance mean in society, life, and art now? Can we find a commonness in how we breathe that would correspond to a commonness in that we breathe?¹⁹ And within the context of filmmaking: How can I create a structure, a language, a rhythm that gives an image the possibility to breathe?

WBH: Two things stuck out to me. Firstly, that your work does not simply recount a biographical story through documentary. It’s not purely factual in that way. To go back to what you said earlier, you are interested in liberatory practices that, as I interpret it, involves an ongoing process of negotiation and aspiration instead of a finite outcome or indisputable narrative. The second thing that stood out to me was the word “reality,” in particular how your mother described as “surreal” the moment of miraculously being able to swim and breathe underwater despite never having learned to swim. Janet Mock succinctly writes that “‘realness’ means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative.”²⁰ This applies of course to embodied transgender politics, but I’m also interested in what this then says about our sense of perception and scale, and the possibilities inherent in these codes of life. Reality is always embedded in surreality, which makes the latter even more magical and illusory. Was your mother actually able to see and breathe underwater, or was it a divine miracle? Maybe it was a bit of both.

THNC: Yes, absolutely. Reality and fiction interare.²¹ What I’ve attempted to do with this film is to create a structure, conditions, and methods for these realities/fictions to unfold, to converge and collide with each other. Thinking in dualistic terms, one may say that the film oscillates between various modes of reality/fiction: memory and imagination, documentary and (auto)fiction, mythology and science fiction, the process of filming and the film itself. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in doing this, but my aspiration is to dissolve these distinctions, to make the viewer experience these different realities/fictions as rising and falling waves within a body of water.

I have a dear friend, a theoretical and experimental quantum physicist with whom I have talked about quantum physics and cinema on a regular basis. We have often contemplated the observer effect, a phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the reality you’re observing, i.e., the behavior of the particles being observed. It really fascinates me how ontology and epistemology are entangled within this context. While trying to avoid being simplistic and drawing direct parallels between these two drastically different fields, we have asked ourselves how the presence of a camera shapes the realities/fictions we’re observing through the lens. How will being conscious of the fact that our dialogue, our (inter)action will be recorded with a camera and observed by an audience shape the way my mother and I talk to and interact with each other? Being conscious of the fact that this exchange between you and me will be published and observed by a reader—how does that shape the way we conduct and edit the conversation? Does our (inter)action become a form of performance? Does this performance make visible a certain reality/fiction? What kind of reality/fiction do we observe when we’re filming the protagonist before we say “action” and keep filming after we say “cut”?

There is a scene in the film where you can hear the protagonist talking to the chicken she’s holding in her arms, while the cinematographer changes the lens. You can see how the image changes after the new lens has been installed. The director then asks the protagonist to wait for a few seconds before the actual scene begins, before they dive into a mnemonic space. Gradually, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a mother telling the story to her child. Toward the end of the scene, she says, “In challenging times, you have to be a good actor. The better you are, the more likely you are to get yourself out of dangerous situations.” The moment she says that, something strange, perhaps even surreal happens. This scene is probably a condensation of some of the ideas and questions I previously addressed.

Finally, although the film takes my mother’s individual experience as a point of departure, I hope to expand that experience and create a cinematic ecosystem by layering multiple oral and written (non)narratives, realities and fictions, events and agencies shaped by both human and more-than-human forces across space and time.

WBH: Another word that came to mind is performance. With regards to the performance of motherhood in your work, I thought specifically of how Joshua Chambers-Letson describes performance as “a way to reproduce our losses in the present and defer the second killing of our loved ones.”²² Writing about Danh Vo’s 2012 exhibition I M U U R 2, an extensive and curated display of almost four thousand objects collected by the late artist Martin Wong and his mother, Florence Wong Fie, Chambers-Letson further argues that through “performance’s quite queer mode of reproduction . . . queer of color life is reproduced by an aesthetic gesture, rather than biological process,” suggesting that “a mother need not be of biological relationship to the child to be a mother, nor must her status as mother be determined by her, his, or their biology.”²³                                                    

As you were talking about quantum physics, I also thought of an essay by Karen Barad, in which she writes, “It is not that electrons sometimes engage in such perverse explorations: these experiments in intra-active trans*material performativity are what an electron is. . . . Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. . . . Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open.”²⁴

I thought this could also be a good point to talk about how your work embodies the radical openness of matter. At some point in our conversations, we realized that we each have a very representative color. Yours is blue and mine is pink. You once described color as not just a superficial aesthetic choice. It is a core conceptual and theoretical point of our research and practice. Pink is something that I can’t fully rationalize. It has been with me since I was a teenager. When we pointed out blue and pink as each other’s go-to colors, it got me thinking about how they are loaded with cultural ideologies, the most obvious being sex and gender norms. In his book Chromophobia, the artist David Batchelor argues that “colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture,” and that these presumably skin-deep, cosmetic prejudices are in fact codes for deeply entrenched fears and anxieties, for example, of contamination and corruption by unknown, foreign entities including migrants, the queer, the feminine, the Oriental, and so on.²⁵ For Batchelor, the prejudice against color “conflate[s] the sinister and the superficial.”²⁶ Funnily, Batchelor, when referencing philosopher C. L. Hardin’s extensive studies on the science of color, mentions, almost as an afterthought in parentheses, that “the entire existence of pink” is an “anomaly.”²⁷ I love that there is no disguising the iconic irrelevance of pink. As a non-binary person, I think my work is so defined by lurid, blooming pinks because it hints at the gendered experiences and expectations that I’ve been excluded from but that have, and remain, palpable to me in different ways. Pink is my negotiation with worldly impositions. Could you talk more about how the color blue performs or does the work of imagination in your practice?

THNC: That was amazing. I love the interconnections you’re creating. Have you, as a child, also asked yourself why the sky is blue? There is a paragraph in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets I really like: “The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal put it, ‘The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.’ In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.” Produced by darkness and light, void and fire, wow!

One of my favourite films is Derek Jarman’s Blue. It’s a meditation on his experience with AIDS, color, and the void through an intricately layered landscape of voices, sounds, and music set against an unchanging field of blue.²⁸ Jarman states in a proposal for the film, “The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty.”²⁹ Although liberty may hold different meanings in our works, I, too, aspire to move into a “landscape of liberty” at the end of Into The Violet Belly.

For the last scene, I collaborated with Frankie (Franziska Aigner) who composed, produced, and performed a song based on “Learning Late Letters,” a poem written by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng.³⁰ Frankie reduced the second part of the song—in which she recites various forms of dying—to two elements: the sound of my mother’s breath and her own voice. I was deeply moved by her process of recording my mother’s breathing. Fujiko Nakaya speaks about the interval between an inbreath and an outbreath as an “empty void” that contains the “largest potential.”³¹ In the last moments of the film, all images die: the viewer is invited to become “an astronaut of the void”³² by immersing themselves in a field of blue—perhaps an interval between life and death—while listening to my mother’s breaths and Frankie’s voice.

But like your relationship with pink, I can’t fully rationalize mine with blue. So let me tentatively close this conversation by saying:  She who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.³³

The post Into The Void of Metamorphosis: Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Wong Binghao in conversation appeared first on post.

The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. Included here are abstracts and recordings of the panels. In order to continue the conversations, written responses from Sarah Lookofsky, current Dean of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and former Associate Director of the International Program at MoMA, and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, will soon to be linked on this page. The seminar series was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow; Madeline Murphy Turner, Former Cisneros Institute Research Fellow for Latin America, and Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize seminars, of which Transversal Orientations Part II forms part. These seminars connect the broad research interests of the four groups and enable members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art.

Transversal Orientations Part II was conceived as a continuation of the conversations and possibilities raised in the 2021 seminar. Building on the ideas generated in this first iteration, which invoked transversalism’s potential for envisioning alliances and surpassing oppositions, this year’s seminar sought to explore and annotate the transversal as a methodology for working between geographical borders and beyond disciplinary and epistemological siloes, while also acknowledging the challenges of such an approach in our fractured, solipsistic present.

Some of the questions raised were: what can we learn by looking and speaking across geographies, histories, and epistemes? What patterns, knowledges, currents, and recognitions emerge when we interweave regional concepts and metaphors? What emancipatory worldviews arise or collapse at these unexpected intersections and gatherings? And, finally, how can we utilize a transversal perspective amid our present-day reality, in which right-wing nationalist leaders have come to power, borders have been fortified, and dialogical exchange often seems to be insufficient or even unattainable?

A term that originates in the field of mathematical geometry, the transversal has been taken up by thinkers to destabilize the ways in which relations are canonically accepted. Transversality “implies a desire in interdisciplinarity for knowledge and practices that are in some senses yet to be made proper.”¹ While aspiring towards the transformative potential of the transversal approach, this year’s seminar came to terms with the lived limitations and violences of categorically closed designations.

Comprised of four panels over two days, each panel featured a distinct pair of speakers  who engaged and acknowledged the limitations of transversalism in the historical present through issues of territory, colonial catastrophe, gender politics, and non-human ontologies.

Participants

Pamila Gupta, Daniel Lie, Sophio Medoidze, Nnenna Okore, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Isabel Sandoval, Diana Tamane, Daiara Tukano

Acknowledgements

The Fellows wish to thank the C-MAP Group Leaders (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Roxana Marcoci, Inés Katzenstein, Stuart Comer, and Cara Manes) and Jay Levenson, Marta Dansie, Michelle Kuo, Josh Siegel, Howard Deitch, Christopher Brown, Mitchell Leitschuh, and Hayna Garcia for their invaluable input and assistance.

Day 1

Panel 1: In Thick Co-Presence

This panel explores the co-dependence and kinship between humans and other-than-humans. Looking specifically at the co-constitutive relationship between care and harm, this panel relatedly investigates the roles that gender and sexuality play in the creation of shared ecologies. The panel title comes from Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which discusses the importance of eschewing the future in favor of present realities and challenges.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Daniel Lie’s work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Lie’s practice is their desire to develop works which decenter human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term “other-than-human beings,” such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that morph, decay, and evolve, Lie’s ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor of science and technology studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

Panel 2: Cycles and Reclamations

Cycles and Reclamations probes the relationship between art and social engagement pertaining to ecological crises and territory disputes. It asks, how do practitioners draw attention to these challenges by transversing professional and cultural silos? When working with the subjects of land and sea, how do creators engage with politics to call attention to the adversities we endure? Finally, what kinds of creative encounters can be proposed as solutions?

Nnenna Okore is an artist-researcher-teacher who uses artistic practice, pedagogy, and social engagements to address ecological issues. She has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, art making, and an awareness of current environmental issues. Working largely with eco-based materials, Okore uses food-based bioplastic materials to create delicate works of art that engender dialogue about waste reduction and sustainable practices in art making. Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award and Creative Victoria Award from Australia.

Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio – Duhigô, known as Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano Indigenous people – Yé’pá Mahsã, Eremiri Húusiro Parameri clan of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, was born in São Paulo. She is an artist, activist, educator, and communicator who graduated in visual arts and master in human rights from the University of Brasília. She researches the right to memory and truth of Indigenous peoples. From 2015 to 2021 she was the coordinator of Rádio Yandê, the first indigenous Internet-radio in Brazil. Recently, she won the 2021 PIPA Online Award, organized by the PIPA Institute, the most renowned Brazilian visual arts prize. She studies the culture, history, and traditional spirituality of its people together with their family. She lives in Brasília.

Day 2

Panel 3: (Im)possible Returns

Taking up the call for critical (art) geography to think about the complexity of communities, and an awareness of the issue of scales when we discuss and employ a transversal vision, this panel draws on the transversal as an intense interdisciplinary mode whereby different topologies, for instance, colonial or post-Soviet migration, come into communication, bringing newfound understanding and literacy to the consequences of imperialism.

Pamila Gupta is a professor at WiSER, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring, and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa. She is the author of two monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014) and Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (2019).

Diana Tamane (b. 1986, Latvia/Estonia). In the artist’s works, family albums, documents, and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and how a complex political history and presence intertwines with the needs and dreams of ordinary people. Tamane graduated from the Tartu Art College, the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, and HISK post-academic program, Ghent. In 2020, with APE, she published Flower Smuggler, which has received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and been shortlisted in the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Panel 4: Rituals and Rapture

Joyous, occult, or banal, rituals are a part of our everyday lives and imaginations. This panel explores how rituals – religious, social, daily, or otherwise – are depicted in art and film. In particular, the significance of gender in rituals will be discussed to shore up how supposedly fixed borders (material, bodily, territorial, epistemological) can be crossed.

This panel featured screenings of film and moving image works by Sophio Medoidze and Isabel Sandoval that have not been reproduced here. Watch the pre-recorded conversation between Medoidze, Sandoval, and C-MAP Fellows Inga Lace and Wong Binghao in the video link below.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at the OUTPOST gallery, Ermes Ermes, LUX, CAC Bretigny, Serpentine Cinema (Peckhamplex), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tate Modern (upcoming), and others. She was a recipient of Tyneside cinema’s Projections commissions and Feature Expanded development and Sub-ti awards for her latest film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!). A collection of Medoidze’s short stories, Bastard Sun, will be published in 2022.

Recognized by the Criterion Collection as “one of the most exciting and multitalented filmmakers on the indie scene,” Isabel Sandoval has made three dramatic features, including Señorita, Apparition and the Independent Spirit Award–nominated Lingua Franca. Her films have played at major international festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, which won a development prize at the 2021 Berlinale. She recently directed the FX limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book, starring Andrew Garfield.

The post Transversal Orientations Part II: C-MAP Seminar appeared first on post.

Wong Binghao: In your artworks, you imaginatively congregate a diverse, cross-pollinating, and ever-changing array of intellectual and countercultural references (Black feminism, Haitian anti-colonial histories, permaculture, music, pop culture, queerness), media (sculpture, photography, video, installation, text, sound), and sensorial experiences (smell, hearing, taste, touch, emotion). You’ve described your work as a “kaleidoscopic prism with multiple entries of meanings and signs.”¹ You are an architect or facilitator of these permutations. How are these creative connections and networks important to your practice? What do they do or manifest?

Gaelle Choisne: This kaleidoscopic artistic prism is, of course, influenced by postcolonial cultural studies, where action and thought are open to a multiplicity of domains through which one can interconnect truths and experiences that will be authentic to historicity. I see this as a way of embracing the world and its complexity. I am especially interested in soliciting our wide range of cognitive and sensorial capacities. Before the Enlightenment, there already existed visions of the world that were less cut, chopped, and fragmented; science embraced astrology, chemistry, and divinatory arts. As beings belonging to a larger universe, we already exist within a network, in which all branches learn from each other. I work in a very large field of social and cultural experimentation, transmission, learning, imitation, and reproduction, and I translate it through my prism—a wide array of creation and encounters that always mixes with my intimate and personal stories. What interests me is, of course, how universes meet, dialogue, or reject each other. Everything lies in the experience. I am on the ground, I talk to people, I am interested in them, I listen to them, and I let them deploy their own creative field if we decide to work together. For instance, Temple of Love—Attente (Waiting; 2020) is a project I proposed for La Villette in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I invited students from École des Actes, a French language school for newly arrived immigrants, to produce the set design for an upcoming video work. Partnering with them during one week of a paid workshop allowed us to create a moment of intense collaboration, apprenticeship, and solidarity. Another example is Temple of Love—Atopos, presented in 2022 at MAC/VAL (Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne) in Vitry-sur-Seine near Paris, where we invited people with reduced mobility and young people from the neighborhood to attend and get involved in somatic dance sessions with choreographer and voguing yoga dancer Emanuelle Soum. I personally will be part of one of these sessions to offer moments of energetic healing and meditative relaxation.

I also create in deep relation with my spirituality and my shamanistic learning, which is growing more and more, and opens doors related to a more omnipotent intuition. In a more concrete way, I build and realize these networks with the Temple of Love project. My primary intention has always been to talk about political issues, but also to open up these issues as much as possible through forms, or situations, or devices as various as dance floors, a massage table, projection rooms, furniture . . . I put forward formal devices dealing with postcolonial and racial issues, social injustices, or issues of minoritized people, such as queer communities.

WBH: Temple of Love (2018– ) is your long-term, ongoing series of immersive and sprawling installations, each inspired by various chapters in Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). There are currently thirteen iterations. In what ways has Temple of Love changed (or not) since you first embarked on it, and why?

GC: Here is the manifesto of Temple of Love, which I wrote in 2018:

“Temple of love is an inclusive ecosystem around the notion of love.
It seemed essential to put forward the concept of love as a new political deal and to make it predominant in a heterosexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic society dominated by an authoritarian and predominantly white patriarchate. This radical, inverted communitarianism must be quickly challenged by cultural and governing institutions.
The “Temple of Love” project began in 2018–2019 in Bétonsalon in Paris, as a preface to a geographically indeterminate cycle.
It takes shape as an uninterrupted, multidisciplinary, systemic space.
The temple must be considered as a sacred space, i.e., linking the spaces of men and Gods and spiritual entities. This implies a questioning of our way of thinking about the world, the universe, the Nature that surrounds us.
It is of public utility.
It contains its own rules and customs.
It allows the questioning of the museum space as an entity coming from the colonial heritage.
The temple of love is ecofeminist by embodying a queer and therefore inclusive empowerment.

T.O.L is a space of resistance. It activates itself through meeting and sharing.

Temple of Love is defined through its modes of appearance and its genesis according to its invitations and its location. It is adaptable.

Roland Barthes’s original essay on love, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, in 1977, will guide us through each new chapter of the Temple of Love. I will adapt each chapter of the essay from the private to the public sphere.

T.O.L is a tribute to the invisible bodies, to minority and fragile souls and to dispossessed hearts.

I act as an artist and in very close collaboration with the curators to create a set of invitations for Russian dolls.
As an artist, I propose already existing works in the corpus of this project, new works produced for the new chapter, sometimes a new video referring to it.

The works correspond to functional sculptures acting at the crossroads of design, art, and architecture.
The functional aspect of the sculptures refers to a desacralization of art through the possibility of touching and using it.
What I like to highlight in the project—when possible—are the punctual or permanent invitations within the exhibition, of living or dead artists to whom I pay homage, who inspire me and whom I love: they are my “Luvs*.”“

Temple of Love is a backbone that allows me to generate all kinds of sculptural forms, design, and architecture, and above all, to create a real system of invitations, always according to geography, budget, institutional context, etc. The project has evolved considerably. The first chapter, which was presented in 2018 at Bétonsalon in Paris, was an ode to love and a response to racism in an overly burdensome, heteronormative, patriarchal system. The exhibition was sort of a preface to the project that allowed me to instill a system in which new ideas would be created with new invitations—in this case, artists, structures, philosophers, and activists such as Tarek Lakhrissi; Nadia Yala Kisukidi; Karim Kattan; or The Cheapest University; Carmen Brouard; Hessie; my mother, Marie-Carmel Brouard; Crystallmess; Eden Tinto Collins; Yu Araki; Arghtee; and more. The chaptered structure provides me with an axis of reflection, commented and completed by the invited figures. These figures are sometimes ghostlier than others—but they remain very important to me. It’s a way of highlighting my own creative process, which has always been done through tributes. Chance is also significant in my process, since each chapter exists by chronological iteration. I only read a specific chapter of Barthes’s book when I deploy a new T.O.L. iteration. I also never take the intimate context of Barthes’s love duo at face value, since I always retranslate it for a more social and political context—and at the end, the idea remains the same. Of course, Barthes is an important figure—the way he treats the emotional status as a white, homosexual man is revolutionary. But that being said, bell hooks is also a matrix figure of this evolving project. The way she speaks about love in the African American/Black community in the US is a major statement for me, which makes me consider her like a mother. So, Barthes is definitely not alone in Temple of Love. For instance, in 2019, for my reinterpretation of the “Adorable” chapter of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, I proposed a tribute to Haitian classical pianist and composer Carmen Brouard and invited the students from the Colburn School of music to re-perform her pieces. I like to mix eras and styles in order to provoke third spaces of thought and creation.

WBH: Could you describe the elements in your multisensory installation Temple of Love—Love to Love for the recent New Museum Triennial? Why did you choose a refrigerator as the “main” structure for this installation?

GC: I came up with and interpreted the statement “love to love” as an expression of the ego. In the installation, I sought to embody the destructive voice of the ego inside us—which sometimes appears to be the origin of racism. I imagined a whole journey, an initiatory route, where one would shift from the raw state of an oversize ego to a state of gratitude and unconditional love. For this peregrination, I imagined a corridor interspersed with grids and barriers that represent the imaginary obstacles of our own limiting beliefs. These were only imaginary and didn’t physically protect or block anything or anyone. Other symbolic elements also appeared. Some CNC–milled sculptures made of walnut after Paleolithic Venus figures guarded the “temple”—the future joins the past to state a time that no longer exists. From time to time, perfumed smoke is emitted from one of the shipping crates in the installation. The fragrance is about unconditional love. It has a really light and fresh smell composed with some prominent spice notes, a beautiful balance between the sky and the earth. I made it in collaboration with Morgan Courtois and called it “Corps Subtiles” (Subtle Bodies). It cleanses souls and nourishes them with unconditional love. On the shipping crates, there were images from my various travels to Haiti, Brazil, and China, which were mixed with photographs from lesbian feminist archives sourced from the Internet. These crates were functional: they once contained the entire installation, and were then transformed into artworks themselves. The ghostly Madonna, a mysterious hooded sculpture dressed in chains of black roses with many balloon-like appendages, was placed opposite the refrigerator and acted as its mirror. It is the embodiment of a wounded faith, of both a masculine and a feminine energy. This installation is very spiritual. The sage branches for purification, which I wrapped myself and stuck between the grids of the fences, act as a reminder of this. They are also a tribute to the traditional use of plants in Haiti and elsewhere.

The talking “LSD” refrigerator appeared as a strange figure from the human unconscious, fed by our emotions and fears. It spoke through an androgynous voice—my own voice, which was altered—so that gender identification would not be obvious. This sculpture speaks to our anxieties, what the media feeds us, and what feeds hate—whether it be racial or not.

It is a funny and endearing but toxic character who sees a possible door to healing. My voice also acted as a collective energy healing. This is the text “spoken” by the refrigerator:

“EAT ME EAT ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

I don’t want to say my name. I prefer to stay anonymous.

I can be everyone and nobody.

I can’t describe myself. You know me already haha, yes, I’m those energy-consuming thoughts. I can’t feel the pain of your soul. I live for myself and only for myself.

I live for myself and only for myself. I’m satisfied when I’m right. I help you wear masks. I’m sure it’s the only way to protect you. I know it’s also a way to feed your wounds. The more you ignore me, the more I exist in you. Of course I love to be complimented and to be recognized. I’ll use every method to get more compliments hahaha hum hum hum . . . Hum, I am a stranger who has lived in your soul for so long that you have forgotten about me. You have become homeless in your own home.

You feed me easily when someone hurts you. I’m so proud, not humble at all, I love comparing everything and judging everything. Hahahaha that’s my funny game.”

WBH: How does your relationship with Haiti and the diaspora influence your work (or not)?

CG: My relationship with Haiti is quite complex. I discovered the country really late. The only connection I had to it was through my mother and my aunts, their expressions and behaviors, the Creole language used sometimes at home, and most of all the food. I went to Haiti for the first time in 2012, and it came as a double shock.

The first shock was my understanding of how my work was connected to this country without even knowing it. This organized chaos, this baroque and variegated way that I create forms and installations; the fragility of things, their ghostly presence, suspended in time and ready to disappear, in a place where elements vibrate singularly before our eyes. Colors, odors, landscapes, ways to do things and know-how—everything felt so close and yet so far.

The second shock was to discover a country still standing up after an earthquake that tore cities and families down. Haiti is brave. She never has time to recover: dangers and disasters are always at her front door. Despite multiple jeopardizing scenarios, the country has a strong and intense philosophy of life based on the importance of existence.

I’m also inspired by Haiti’s history and its stories, from urbanism to Haitian and voodoo culture. One can see these themes and topics in many ways in my work. Photography took on a new meaning when I went there for the first time. I wanted to offer images of the country that were deeper than the journalistic and touristic points of view used in Europe. Sharing and re-creating bonds between my personal, fragmented life and this Haitian life brought a lot of answers. It’s a concentrate of world diplomacy, in which one can quickly and intensely witness the direct consequences and repercussions of capitalism, international corruption, and political dishonesty. Haiti is also the embodiment of cultural blending. It is a country invented by colonization, where cultures and customs interwove themselves through slaves who came from all across Africa—but, most importantly, from Congo and Benin. This diversity and cultural interweaving take root in my work.

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Wong Binghao: Hi, Jeab! I’d like to begin our interview by discussing the importance of engaging audiences, which I recall speaking with you about in Phnom Penh in late 2018. You are keenly aware that the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, where you serve as artistic director, attracts many different demographics, from tourists to people who aren’t familiar with art at all. How have your strategies for audience engagement changed due to COVID-19?

Gridthiya Gaweewong: These are difficult questions to answer because we lost touch with our audiences after closing our physical space in 2018, and then when we planned to open a new building, we were hit by COVID-19. But what we did and will continue to do is to create a variety of public programs that might appeal to different audiences, from schoolchildren to the general public to specific groups within the art community and academia. During that period, in the first quarter of 2020, we invited local artist Kornkrit Jianpinidnan (born 1975) to interact with our collection of William Warren’s books and use them as the point of departure to create his new series of photographs, printed materials, and moving images. The show was site specific to our library space, and it gave viewers different ways of experiencing the artwork. They could browse through the artist’s books, which Kornkrit installed on our bookshelves and tables. This project happened at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020, after which we were closed down because the city government announced the first lock-down. We extended the show and tried to conduct the public programs that we had already planned, which involved inviting guest speakers to talk online about queer teenagers and lifestyles in the Bangkok area during the Cold War. But the artists and guest speakers were not familiar with online platforms, and so they refused to participate. I found it quite interesting to see this, because though giving lectures online via Zoom seemed relatively new for the arts community here, we had done broadcasts via Facebook Live and YouTube before.  

WBH: You have previously mentioned that your favorite part about curatorial work is meeting with artists in their studios to conduct research and gather information. What is a memorable or significant lesson that you have learned from artists?

GG: The most precious occasions, and those l always cherish, are the times that I spend with artists during studio visits or when I meet them in person. To visit an artist’s studio even just once or twice before the birth of a project is such a privilege. It’s like we are allowed to enter their context and their world. I really enjoy getting to know not only what kind of environment and ideas shape their mind and their thinking process, but also the way they deal with their reality, family, and community. This kind of information helps me to better understand their work, which is important when I have to conclude my research and make decisions. The most intense studio visit I had was during a trip to Beijing in the early 2000s. I went to China to do research for a show organized by the Japan Foundation called Under Construction. Beijing-based curator Pi Li, who was one of eight Asian curators invited by the Foundation to join this project, helped to arrange my time with artists. I met more than ten artists in one day! That was at the peak of the contemporary Chinese art scene. Our last studio visit was with Wang Gongxin (born 1960), whose studio was out of town. We returned to town to have dinner—Sichuan hot pot—around two o’clock in the morning. That was the first time I went to Beijing, even though I’d been to other Chinese cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou before. However, that kind of short trip, what people now call “parachuting,” is not so healthy as it’s quite intense and doesn’t allow for as much in-depth exploration. Maybe it’s okay to do it when you are still young and have energy. As I get older, I prefer to spend more time in one place, for instance through a residency program, to learn more about the context and art ecology of a particular city. For example, the residencies with IASPIS (International Artists Studio Program) in Stockholm, Asian Cultural Council, or the Japan Foundation Grants, which grant curators a one-to-six-month stay, are much better. Above all, what I get from a studio visit is a friendship that slowly develops with artists and their collaborators. This is the humanistic side of being part of the art community, and I have found it beautiful and rewarding.

WBH: In 2006, you made the observation that “in Thailand the difference between an organizer and curator is meaningless. If you have an idea you want to try, you make the laws yourself, and you do it yourself. That’s what it means to be a curator in Thailand.”¹ I share your concerns about taking up the vaunted or universal label of “curator.” That is to say, curatorial work should be context specific. How do you think the situation in Thailand has changed, if at all, for curators and curating in the past two decades?

GG: Did I say that? I totally forgot about that quote, LOL. That kind of sentiment is history, since it was said around the mid-2000s, when Patrick (Flores) did a residency in Thailand. And I felt so bitter about working as a curator without infrastructure and moral support from the community. People in the arts and the society-at-large didn’t get the difference between the terms “curator” and “organizer”—they just called us “Poo JAD,” or organizers. There were not many museums or alternative spaces to help distinguish the difference between the commercial and nonprofit worlds, or the market and the museum/biennial art world.

But in the past decades, curating as a profession has become more visible because of the rise of such institutions as public and private museums and biennials, and the accessibility of information through social media. The younger generation is interested in this career, and finds being a curator a cool thing. So many young people further their studies abroad, and I find more and more people use the term “curator” in multiple contexts outside of the art world. However, students in Thailand still have to go abroad to study curatorial practices. Because of this, and the demands within the country and the region, the Jim Thompson Art Center has collaborated with Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts to launch a new online master’s degree program in curatorial practice next year. We will invite professional curators, theorists, and art historians in the region and beyond to teach, and plan to place interns with many institutions, as well as to have weekly seminars throughout each semester.

WBH: Your doctoral dissertation discusses what you describe as the “invisible curatorial practices” or “small narratives” in Thai and Southeast Asian art. For example, events like the Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992–98), an artist-initiated, self-organized festival. What other “small” or “invisible” practices or issues do you think deserve more critical attention?

GG: The idea of small narratives is an ongoing project. It has served as a parameter as well as a departure point since the beginning of my curatorial practice. My dissertation research focused on the exhibition histories and the art worlds of Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on artist collectives and artist-run projects like Chiang Mai Social Installation, Ruangrupa’s Militia and Video Art Festival, and TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project. Even though these case studies are quite different in nature, they are similar in that they were operated by artists. They feature bottom-up approaches and strongly critique state and institutions. They are like voices from below, “small narratives” that contest the grand narratives constructed and fabricated by the institutions within their specific contexts. In recent years, the other type of “small narratives” or “invisible issues” that I’m interested in have not only been about art history and how it was written, but also about socially engaged art in relationship to reality and history that we consider problematic, especially grand narratives like nationalist historiography. Recently, I find it fascinating that the younger generation, like secondary school and university students, who have been part of the student movements in recent years, have been interested in this topic and others—such as democracy and structural problems. There are also more publications on alternative and counter histories based on the PhD theses of local progressive scholars. This has contributed to an interesting intellectual movement in Thailand, though it has happened quite late compared to other countries in the region. The critical issues that are being discussed now include the decline of the democratic system, reforming the constitution and the lèse majesté laws, and disruptions by military intervention, such as several coups d’etat. These issues are the products and remnants of the colonial and Cold War histories. And this is probably why many local artists and scholars revisit this particular historical period.

Currently, I’m working on a series of four exhibitions that are the result of a collaboration between the Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery of Indonesia, Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin, and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, and initiated by the Goethe-Institut. Titled Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories, this project focuses on the institutions’ collections. The idea for the series centers on alternative histories from Southeast Asia and beyond. My exhibition titled ERRATA looks at the MAIIAM collection as the errata of art collections in our local context, which resonates with regional and global histories of the colonial and Cold War periods. Future Tense, the inaugural exhibition in Jim Thompson Art Center’s new building, which is scheduled to open around the end of November 2021, will feature artworks by fourteen regional and international artists and will also deal with Cold War history from multiple perspectives. Many of the artworks that we have selected trace counter histories, collective memories, geopolitics, military strategies and their consequent effects in various contexts, from Asia to Eastern Europe and Latin America. I feel that artists and curators have to work together as archaeologists to excavate the untold histories and small narratives that can be relevant to our reality.

WBH: We share a love of good food. If you could describe your curatorial practice as a dish or ingredient, what would it be, and why?

GG: Great question, Binghao! Somtam (papaya salad), a spicy food for thought!!! It’s fresh, healthy, and complex. It consists of many flavors—sweet, salty, sour, savory, and spicy. Papaya, tomatoes, and chilies (some of the ingredients used in the dish) are the products of the colonial period, having arrived in Southeast Asia from Latin America through the Europeans. But our people localized these, and made somtam a “national dish,” which is very funny and debatable because it’s a signature dish from the Mekong region. The curatorial practices in our region are like these ingredients: they are also the products of colonization and modernization. But they have been contextualized and localized in our own context. I would consider somtam with lots of chilies as a metaphor for my curatorial practice. Whether through exhibitions or other kinds of art-related programs, I want people to experience the same effect as when they eat spicy somtam. After they see a show or join our programs, I want them to feel like they have had spicy food for thought

The post Small Narratives and Spicy Somtam: Gridthiya Gaweewong and Wong Binghao in Conversation appeared first on post.

Wong Binghao: Ming, I see your practice as a continuous intellectual pursuit, and you as an artist-polymath. I am indebted to your continued generosity and candor for this belated epiphany. More than the many signs and surfaces of your work that audiences or critics might pick up on—drag, identity, nation, film, etc.—your artworks and trajectory as an artist feel like manifestations of your ceaseless curiosity about the world. This is a desire that cannot be pinned down. As a chief example, you typically learn and perform new languages (German, Japanese, Turkish, and Italian, among others) and do extensive research on cultural and historical contexts whenever you make a new work. What inspires your fervor for learning and inquiry?

Ming Wong: I have always strongly felt, and still do, like an outsider, the middle child, the outlier, the one who never fits in. I’ve learned that this may be because of a whole intersection of things: being queer; the racial, national “other” (having lived abroad for almost twenty-five years); the artist, the dilettante, the imposter; always in between, forever code-switching. I guess over the years, the strategies I have put to use in my attempts at survival, acceptance, or even some notion of “grace,” have accumulated to form an artistic arsenal that expresses the insistence of my existence, a quest for more equivalence, compassion, and codependency in our lives. I have learned to question systems, partisanships, forms of suspect “solidities”—suspended particles that would settle into sediment were it not for some constant stirring action against profit-driven, patriarchal, racist, colonialist impulses. To queer the system, and even to queer the queer, the only constant is change; contradiction, disloyalty, and betrayal are sometimes inevitable.

WBH: To pick up on the salience of your last point, and departing from the reductive readings of “drag” in your work, how do you think gender and queerness have left imprints on your work? It feels like you mobilize them as modalities of relation in your quest for edification.

MW: One of my late realizations is the awareness of what (or whose) cultural landscape I have been an active participant in, and what (or whose) spheres of influence I would like to be a catalyst for, and that’s a difficult question. I am aware that most of the circles that I operate in are determined by language, along with the correlative legacies of history, culture, philosophy, etc. With globalization’s “lost-in-translations,” one can get caught up in a false consciousness of doing what one thinks is “art,” or of being what one thinks is an “artist.” I try to sieve these ideas of a universal language of art from the workings of market forces.

Personally, I feel as though I have been “dragging” between worlds: a cosmopolitan, diasporic South Chinese identity separate from any notions of nationalism to the People’s Republic of China; still recovering from a vestigial postcolonial hangover (I once heard a drag performer say, “You can take the girl out of Singapore, but you can’t take Singapore out of the girl”); queering the ground of the international (read: Euro-American) art arena that a fool like myself had rushed into and where true art angels fear to tread.¹ In these different contexts, I often feel like an unwitting spy, the uninvited guest, disguised in double-drag (or intersectional drag!), a double-crossing, cross-dressing agent. Sometimes I feel like the world isn’t ready for me—is it vain to say that? At times I feel like I’m posing for small change on the sidewalk, biding my time as I wait for the real (Beckettian) circus to arrive.   

WBH: Speaking of vanity and its asymmetries, a particular moment that stuck out to me in your performance with Alexander Geist of their electro-pop song “That Girl” was when Geist gestured at you and lip-synched the apropos lyric that you “drap[e] yourself in a cloak of indiscernible stealth.” This made me think of your presentation/performance during a 2011 Hong Kong Art Fair panel debating the notion that “Art Must Be Beautiful,” in which you motioned that “I use beauty a lot in my work, but it [art] cannot stop at beauty. . . . Art has to go beyond surface decoration, distraction, drag, fetishism and commodification.” How do devices of unknowability or mystery show up in your practice, and to what effect?

MW: I think I’ve always been a kind of unwilling performer. That sort of describes my style. Because the expectation of explaining oneself is constantly hoisted upon me by the “mainstream.” As an act of resistance, I try not to be too “authentic” or persuasive or to act in a deliberate manner so as not to be taken too seriously. I think it’s a good thing to keep confusing people. Double-drags and triple agents; what you see is not always what you get; I may speak your language, but my accent throws you off; my references, reactions, and motivations seem like they’re from a different planet. This is not just a matter of black or yellow or brown skins and white masks:² there’s always another mask, an’ another an’ another an’ another . . . riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas.³

“Chinatown” is one such cipher, synonymous with the unknowable and indecipherable, a legacy of twentieth-century cultural stereotypes in the English-speaking world. Ten years ago when I was in Los Angeles to do research for a new commission for REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), I ended up dragging as Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and the shady sister-daughter in Making Chinatown (2012), my own hyper-incestuous Chinese knockoff of the eponymous Polanski film—infusing scenes from the dusty cinematic classic with a breath of fresh Chinatown-ness. A few months later, I went back to make a sequel called After Chinatown (2012), in which I trace the cinematic journeys of pioneering migrants who sailed across the Pacific, from Hong Kong to Hollywood. In the video, a Chinese detective dons a “Chinaman” mask while on the run around Chinatowns in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are cinematic stand-ins for the hybrid city of Hong Kong. Stalking the detective is a film “chinoir”–style femme fatale—an Asian Barbara Stanwyck (out of Double Indemnity) in blonde wig and sunglasses, dragging as Brigitte Lin in disguise in Chungking Express. They play two imposters looking for lost loves and lost relations, running away from big troubles in little Chinas.⁴

While researching in San Francisco, I stumbled onto Angel Island, which neighbors Alcatraz and is where Chinese immigrants to the United States were “quarantined” and interrogated for weeks, months, or years as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Over two hundred poems, written in Chinese, of hope, despair, and persecution are carved into the walls of the detention barracks. Noticed by a park ranger right before the demolition of these buildings in the 1970s, these poems emerged like secret messages from the past, alerting activists to save these walls that could talk. Today one could imagine those forefathers saying, “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit!” Since over a year ago, the spate of racist attacks against Asians who have been scapegoated for the COVID-19 pandemic inevitably still invokes the era of yellow peril that manifested itself in late colonial Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century.  

During my hibernation from the pandemic, I studied and listened to Hong Kong Cantonese opera and started playing the piano again. Now I’m composing music with a friend of mine who is a classical music conductor; we’re working on a piece called “Rhapsody in Yellow”—a re-mapping of the “sonic regimes” of the United States and China via an assimilation of their national musical monuments Rhapsody in Blue and the Yellow River Concerto. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon’s historic visit to China. It’s distressing to see how far apart the two nations have become from each other.   

WBH: This is a good point to discuss your work in MoMA’s collection: Windows On The World, Part 2 (2014), a twenty-four-channel video installation that explores the relationship between sci-fi and twentieth-century Cantonese opera. How do you see this work responding to the media landscape of China at that particular moment in time?

MW: I spent extensive periods of time in Hong Kong from 2010 onward, researching the technological transformation of the traditional theater of Chinese opera via the emergence of Cantonese opera movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Opera troupes sailed from Hong Kong to perform for the largely Southern Chinese immigrant communities in Chinatowns on the West coast of the United States. Between Hong Kong and Hollywood, there emerged a lively, highly adaptive, genre-busting hybrid cinematic artform that ingeniously fused East and West, past and present. It made me wonder if those artistic innovations of early Cantonese opera cinema could be directed to reflect on the tumultuous events of the twentieth century and toward the future.

It was during those years that I, with the eyes of an artist, witnessed the unfolding changes in Hong Kong and Southern China, the lands of my ancestors, with interest. There was the arrival of Art Basel in Hong Kong and mega-galleries on its shores, the setting up of the M+ museum of visual culture, and the ever-increasing circles of influence from the mainland Chinese art scene. Set against these developments was the mood of growing unrest from a disgruntled post-handover population, which culminated in the protests of the Umbrella Movement, bringing this shiny Sino-futuristic city to a standstill by defiant youth occupying the streets. 

Speculative fiction or science fiction (SF) has always been a platform for reimagining one’s realities and futures, and the study of the history of SF in China has revealed moments throughout the twentieth century when different futures were dreamed of: technological advancement, decolonial liberation, political utopias, or dystopian hyperrealities. Through a montage of the history of Chinese SF with Asian mythology and SF cinema, news footage of China’s space program, and elements of Cantonese opera, I attempted to open windows into the metaphysical contradictions and cultural clashes of my own lived, queer existence.

WBH: In 2019, you joined the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden, as professor of performance in the expanded field. How has this new city/job influenced your artistic practice? Do you feel like you have (or will ever) settle in one place? I ask this because so much of your work seems to narrativize your adaptations to different contexts.

MW: I started this position just before the pandemic, and it has been a challenge in the last year and a half to get beyond the restrictions and social distancing to explore meanings of performance beyond Zoom cages! Going on historical guided walks in the city has helped me to familiarize myself with my new surroundings and also served as a pedagogical foundation for collective performance projects.

Also, I’ve formed a Swedish K-pop boy band, inspired by the cultural phenomenon that is BTS, and also by the fact that a lot of K-pop is crafted by Swedish songwriters and music producers. Our hope is that by “dragging” K-pop from Sweden to Korea and back to Sweden again, perhaps we can discover something about Swedish identity. The band will have its digital debut at the Seoul Mediacity Biennial later this year.

Since my regular research trips to Asia have been interrupted by the coronavirus, I have succumbed to a feeling of emotional exile, as when I look on from a distance at the recent turn of events in Hong Kong or in parts of Southeast Asia. Perhaps this period of social distance from my cultural wellspring will translate into a deeper acknowledgment of and insight about what I have learned and experienced in my transformative artistic positions and journeys across borders through the past decade. 

I’m not sure this feeling of restlessness will ever end. At the moment I remain wary of how tensions between China and the rest of the world are played out in the media and quickly trickle down to reductive assumptions of race, regardless of other forms of identity. This feels like the beginning of another vicious cycle. I can’t help but feel that I have to put my queer foot down on it.     

The post Small Change: Ming Wong and Wong Binghao in Conversation appeared first on post.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize a seminar among all four groups that connects their broad research interests and enables members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art. Hinged on the transversal as a means to engage with and envision new networks and ways of thinking about modern and contemporary art, the 2021 edition offered an exploration and interrogation of the intertwining of multiple coeval life-worlds through concepts of “extending across.”

Over the course of two weeks, transversalism was offered and considered as a third, enabling term. To transverse is to surpass bipolar socio-historically constructed oppositions such as traditional and modern, male and female, man and nature, local and foreign, theory and practice, etc. Rather than adopting a center-periphery dyad or adhering to “mainstream” canonical standards, changing our perspective of looking at art opens up a way to account for different philosophies and nuances of comparison. This seminar series made reference to the methodology of “minor” transnationalism, to think and relate along other scales of knowability.

In addition, the seminar considered what it means to penetrate, exceed, and undermine geopolitical borders that have been set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe; accessible and inaccessible; to construct an “us” and a “them.” A border, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

By considering the transversal in its temporal, geographic and/or directional dimensions, as simultaneity, the seminar series elucidated the implications of the adoption of this operative term to art history, the museum, exhibitions, collections, philosophy and/or artistic practice. In doing this, new relational terms, stories, and people can be thought of together again.

Panel 1: Looking Sideways

This panel examined the processes of migration and contra-flows connecting regions while examining their artistic legacies. Looking at particular geographies, artists, and their stories across time, it aimed to challenge mainstream conceptions of the directionality of exchange within modern and contemporary art. How can minor positions weave a fabric of their own links directly, bypassing the centers of power and information? How can these transnational shared stories be acknowledged and told in a context that recognizes their complexity within history and display systems largely guided by national or global presentations?

Introduced by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and moderated by Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Chairat Polmuk, Lecturer, Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. You can read it here.

Panel 2: Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire

This panel was organized around the idea of the transversal as transfer between disciplines, geographies, the performer, audience and participants, and/or the professional and nonprofessional. By looking at and considering the “repertoire” and acts of transfer through, for instance, translation and embodied dialogue, “hidden” processes of transnational contact and local histories, new cartographies, and unseen relations come into evidence.

Introduced by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA and moderated by Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Laine Kristberga, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Philisophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia, Riga. You can read it here.

Panel 3: Entangled Terrains

This panel is the outcome of an invitation to Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective, and Chie Ikeya to reconsider or remap regions. Thinking about people who cross borders and borders that cross people, the session presented perspectives that acknowledge multidirectional histories of migration, colonialism, and the destabilization of current geographical perimeters. Panelists were tasked with reconsidering territorial logic and place vis-a-vis the mobility of individuals; how our relationship with the inhabited terrain might reformulate imposed delimitations. In this session, borderlands and the spaces in-between were examined, and the manifold ways in which art and visual culture entangle terrain.

Introduced by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA and moderated by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. You can read it in English here and in Portuguese here.

Panel 4: The Politics of Position

This panel explored the particular conditions of locality and the productive tensions between local and global contexts. How do the languages, values, and histories of art and its attendant sociopolitical conditions differ from place to place? Can they be translated, communicated, and made legible, if at all, on a global scale, and what are the stakes of this transfer? Invited speakers discussed the specificities of their local or regional positions or punctuated a pristine map of universality. These discussions aimed to generate understandings of art and culture that are not uniformly appraised and consumed, as well as a sensitivity and humility when encountering art from unfamiliar contexts.

Introduced by Inés Katzenstein, Director, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA and moderated by Madeline Murphy Turner, C-MAP Latin America/Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, MoMA; Ph.D. Candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Response by Riánsares Lozano de la Pola, Researcher and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City. You can read it in English here and in Spanish here.

View the past event page here. 

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Wong Binghao: Daniel, in one of our previous conversations, you mentioned that art can be a “queer line that connects many fields of knowledge.” This statement really resonated with me. What I enjoy about your practice is that you suture different communities, contexts, and actors—from what you call “other-than-humans” like fungi and bacteria to your family history in 1950s Indonesia. What have you gained or learned from this constellational practice?

Daniel Lie: When I spoke about this queer line (queer as a constantly transmuting way of being), I was thinking of art as a learning device that can be related to other fields of knowledge. All of my works are complex and require extensive outreach to people from diverse fields of action and research in order for me to fully understand the perspectives of a topic or concept I am exploring. In these (dis)encounters, open-ended partnerships can be forged on our journey of living and being. 

For instance, in my practice I am broadly interested in the philosophical, scientific, and spiritual aspects of death. This communication and collaboration with many humans and beyond-humans are manifestations of my desire to learn from diverse views. I seek a multilayer relationship with various forms of life, as I recognize their profound importance.

In this regard, I am interested in the correlation between micro- and macrostructures, and in moving between smallness and largeness. For instance, a closeup image of a rotting fruit can look similar to a wide aerial view of a forest. Cohabiting with microorganisms can tell us a lot about how other ecosystems function. By comparison, I find that there are many restraints and limitations in terms of human society as an ecosystem—for example, in the culturally political and ideological ways in which we consider and create kinships. 

As an artist who develops and is driven by research, I experience a wide range of encounters—from within the academy to non-hegemonic and nontraditional educational environments. Queerness allows for a diversion when there are boundaries to access or it deepens expertise in a particular field. For me, the queer line is very much about the possibility of existing in the in-between.

Although delving deeper into a particular topic can create greater resonances, this intensive process can also generate uncomfortable tensions and realizations. For instance, while undertaking site-specific research for my solo exhibition The Negative Years (2019) at Jupiter Artland in Scotland, I visited one of the largest farms cultivating the edible mushrooms commonly sold in European supermarkets. These mushrooms are grown indoors in large, climate-controlled hangars. At a particular point in the growth period, the environmental temperature is intentionally and significantly decreased. The fungi reacts to this menace to their existence by reproducing and generating at an increased speed. I was intrigued by this reaction to planned trauma in the cultivation of an organic species, and drew connections to the way that capitalism in human society induces and demands productivity to the point of exploitation. 

WBH: To build on my previous question, how has nonbinary/trans life and thought figured in your practice? I appreciate that it is never just a matter of literal, one-dimensional representation for you.

DL: I identify with nonbinary-ness because it denies any concrete value. I think it not only is connected to gender, but also goes beyond it. My personal experiences have shown me that the binaries and boundaries of identity—like the dualities of life and death, light and darkness, man and woman, good and evil, and so on—are limiting and restraining. Hegemonic society (Western, human-centric, cis-hetero-white-nationalist supremacy) needs to maintain these dualistic structures so that it can continue to classify, separate, and maintain its hierarchy. But this system does not contemplate the realities of the ecosystem. Even in talking about gender, there are so many identities and expressions of subjectivity. We live in a world that needs diversity for its sustenance.

Going back to my interest in death—it is not only witnessed in the absence of life, but in many moments of the living as well. It is an energy that moves in order for life to happen. For instance, in the phases of life, a child needs to symbolically die in order for the teenager, and subsequently the adult, to come into being. One is contained within the other. In this sense, the binary perspective of life and death has a restrictive notion of beginning and end that diminishes possibilities of existence. 

When organic matter rots, it is not dead, as people commonly believe, but rather filled with the presence of many living beings and decomposers—with fungi, bacteria, and insects. It is full of life. Abjectification is a key process of renewal. So why do we think that rotting matter is dead when the reality is actually quite the opposite? In the process of cohabitating with decay, I came to understand it as a powerful and disruptive element. I find rottenness to be nonbinary: it shows us that there is, in fact, no end or beginning in life or death.

As with my other projects, I arrived at this perception after an extended period of slow research. The passage of time has been an important actor and conceptual pillar in my works since 2014, and I have deepened my knowledge and insights on the subject with each artwork and installation that I have presented. 

Since the start of 2021, I have been developing works under the framework of The Rotten Research. This project includes a series of site- and language-specific creations: essays; other publications; a forthcoming solo exhibition, primarily of drawings, that should open in mid-2021 at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien; and public installations at Berlinische Galerie and around the city of Berlin. The main component of The Rotten Research is a digital project titled Rotten TV: an online broadcasting and research platform that brings together creatives, thinkers, and cultural institutions from Indonesia (Cemeti—Institute for Arts and Society), Brazil (Casa do Povo) and the UK (Jupiter Artland) to progressively investigate the topic of rottenness from April to November 2021, culminating in and coinciding with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which will be held in November in Glasgow. 

WBH: Let’s speak more about the binary of life and death. In a text titled “Walk Along ONG,”which you wrote for an incredibly detailed web-based, multiform project Toko Buku Liong (Liong Bookstore), co-created with Adelina Luft (2020), you imagine revisiting Indonesia with your deceased grandmother, Ong King Nio, sixty years after your family migrated to Brazil. In relation to these real and speculative migrations, you describe feeling like a “forever stranger.” Could you elaborate on the negotiation of place(lessness) and how it might present itself in your practice?

DL: What is life? What is death? Where do we come from? What am I doing right here, right now? These questions are ontological and can sometimes be considered cliché if they are looked at from a shallow perspective. For me they are a starting point from which to dive into complexity.

In an attempt to nurture this complexity, I went to Indonesia and lived there for about fourteen months in 2019–20. I learned the language and took traditional dance classes at the Indonesian Art Institute of Yogyakarta as a way of familiarizing myself with a nonverbal expression based on secular movements. I could not have fed this root of my life and history in Brazil. Once I was in Indonesia, I started to understand many other layers of my story. While searching for a “source,” I realized that there was never a place to “arrive.” Origin does not exist. 

The more I learned about myself and my ancestors, the wider the narrative became. There was not a single point of curiosity. It was the opposite—many more branches sprouted from my initial point of inquiry. As a queer child born in São Paulo to a migrant mother from Pernambuco (Northeast Brazil) and an immigrant father from Java (Central Indonesia), I felt displaced from an early age, like I was already born in a foreign context. The creation of national mythologies in order to belong to a political situation can be reductive. I felt like such norms did not apply to me; they rejected me, as I rejected them. 

I see all of us as organisms that are part of a larger ecosystem called Earth. What are the possibilities for me to relate to this planetary, ecological community? What types of negotiations are needed? Our existence is contingent upon a diversity of other existences. I am thinking here of the “other-than-humans”—of micro- and macroorganisms, quingdoms,¹ spirits, etc. These groups make the conditions for a here and now that we experience as a version of reality. The process of question-making that I have engaged in within my practice is powered by ways of relating with these “other-than-humans” that teach and give me agency.

Madeline Murphy Turner: Daniel, could you speak more to your compelling point about the importance of living with microorganisms and what this can reveal to us about ecosystems? Given the increasing urgency and apathy toward the climate crisis in Brazil, how do you see your practice converging with dialogues regarding ecological issues in the country or region?

DL: The first layer of the ecological system that we deal with is our own body. The many ways that this body will perish and disintegrate into smaller pieces represent, for me, the transition from human whole to environmental part. When we decompose, we become soil, and when we are cremated, we become part of the atmosphere. In each case, there is a significant degree of transformation and expansion. In my practice, I consider how these separations between body and environment can be abolished. Perhaps the first step is acknowledging that humans are not and cannot engage in a hierarchical relationship with other beings. This acceptance requires a process of unlearning.

I have been cohabiting with microorganisms through a simple and daily practice that relates to my research on rottenness. Where I currently live,  I have left a plate of fruits and vegetables to rot, decompose, and putrefy, thus revealing several activities: maggots and flies appear, mold grows and takes over the surface, and food liquefies and/or dries out. In this process, I witness small yet intense changes that debunk the symbolic connection between rottenness and death.

Through my works, I try to create affection toward this neglected but ubiquitous process of life. For example, in my site-specific installation Quing (2019) at Jupiter Artland, I highlighted how the rotting and decomposition of plant-based compost can in fact generate energy. This energy was then used to power an outdoor bioheater that, in turn, created the ideal conditions for fungi and other microorganisms to exist inside the gallery. I think that rottenness is shunned and marginalized by society because it is connected to the collective experience and passage of time, which contrasts with consumerism. One of the most apparent consequences of capitalism is that it constantly devours and discards. As consumers, we are also prime discarders. For example, in the bathroom or when we are taking out the trash, we push a button or close a lid and “undesired” products are gone, out of our sight. This ease of disposal extends to our interpersonal relationships. On social media, with the click of a button, we can unfollow or block someone, we can limit our interactions with and access to a person or information, etc. In my practice, I think critically about these forms of human-centrism and individualism that exist on many different scales.

I think this is the opposite of how things work when environments are not abused. Things don’t simply vanish or end. Just like the law of physics dictates: nothing is lost; nothing is created; everything is transformed. That is one of the main problems with the consumerist society in which we live. There is a lack of sustainability and responsibility for cycles of production, which has led to our current ecological crises. How can I deal with the fact that my body is transforming and aging when popular and visual culture informs me that this natural state of my organic matter is wrong? We are constantly bombarded with images from the makeup industry, from the cult of perfectly fit bodies, and dealing with the intense neurosis of appearance motivated by the fashion industry, plastic surgery, and anti-agism. Our collective desire to constantly consume “new” products and lifestyles has contaminated the possibility of existing as organic beings bound by time-based transformations. As I understand it, ecological apathy is rooted in the contradiction that we can care for the environment while simultaneously being careless consumers. Taking rottenness out of the margins is one solution to breaking out of this apathetic state that signals an uncaring denial of ecological issues. I offer a counterproposal that we create an acquaintanceship, friendship, and kinship with rottenness. If I live long enough with rotten matter, I wonder if I can make peace with myself and understand that my body is also undergoing organic changes. This cohabitation has made a significant impact on my life and made me more aware of the existence of other beings. It has motivated me to keep in contact with them, to learn more about them, and to continue to learn from them about how to be on this planet.

MMT: You have previously articulated the isolation from Brazilian culture you experienced growing up and, alternatively, the strong, embodied pull you feel toward your Indonesian roots. Have you found points of contact between your experience and those of other groups in Brazil that share similar feelings of isolation or disidentification? How have these connections left an impact on your practice?

DL: Acknowledging my own pain and trauma was how I initially found commonalities between my personal experiences and those of other groups in Brazil and beyond. My experience has been specific, due to the cultural isolation from my Indonesian diaspora while growing up in Brazil. I deal with the lingering feeling of isolation by extending my attention and practice to diverse communities, and trying to identify and find comfort with each group. I do this while understanding that there will always be fundamental differences between narratives. Maybe the common feelings of isolation or disidentification stem from an experience of brokenness, which can be repaired by the creation of new bonds.

As a person of Asian descent, or a Pessoa Amarela in Brazilian Portuguese (literally, “Yellow Person”), I have looked for guidance from and am grateful to the communities that have developed necessary strategies for survival under what has long been normalized oppression (for example, those communities subjected to Brazil’s 338-year history of slavery and the genocide of its indigenous people). Their knowledge has been an important source of learning, and I honor them through my practice.

Narrative reparation is one key frame of action in my practice. How can I socially and ecologically contribute to this action in my work? I try to do this by devoting time to create images and propositions that make “marginal” issues or groups that I identify with (like rottenness) more approachable.

WBH: You received degrees in fine art and teaching fine art. How does this pedagogical foundation influence your artwork/practice?

DL: Three key concepts in my artistic practice have been shaped by my teaching studies at São Paulo State University (UNESP): the pedagogy of autonomy (a concept from Paulo Freire²), analyzing the world through visual culture and not only through fine arts, and unlearning as a tool of living. This education gave me an understanding of art as a useful expression of deep social critique and contribution. I like to challenge myself by asking how my artwork can contribute to my life and to the communities that I surround myself with. 

I often make works that are homages to the people and other-than-humans with whom I have developed strong kinship. This artistic process has allowed me to learn and connect more deeply with the world around me. For instance, the installation and performance work  Lindinalva and the Balm (2016) was a testament to the ninety-five years of my late grandmother’s life. The site-specific installation Death Center for the Living Presents: East to East (2018), co-conceived with Anerina da Costa (my aunt), and artists Carmen Garcia and JUP do Bairro, was a multilingual installation that included archival images, poems, and performative elements that functioned as a lab of collective practice and authorship.  Fortunately, through my work, I was also able to honour my father, who recently died of Covid-19 at age sixty-four. I titled my debut gallery exhibition Lie Liong Khing (2015) after him. These acts have given me peace, as they bear witness to the passage of time and become a testimony to life.

The post A Version of Reality: Conversation with Daniel Lie appeared first on post.

Dina: Hi, Bing, and all, thanks for kick-starting this process. It is always good to start the year with collective thinking and reflection. My name is Syafiatudina, or Dina for short. I work as a translator, organizer, and curator in Yogyakarta. I became part of KUNCI in 2009. I have been keeping myself and others busy thinking about institutional practices, social movements, collectivity, and critical pedagogy. I am also finishing my studies in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the University of Bergen with a project and thesis on listening as a political act and the intersection between curatorial and organizing practices. I love cats, dogs, and fashion. I do karaoke by myself regularly to create a space for doing and thinking otherwise.

Ferdi: My name is Ferdi. I dabble in different types of work, mainly in the cultural field, including teaching, writing, giving workshops, researching, and translating—sometimes doing some of them at the same time in order to get by. My top two favorite things to do are sleep and procrastinate. I also deeply enjoy cooking, though I’m not the best of cooks. What gets me going is thinking and doing things together with others, although I am usually the first to be wrecked when this collective mode of working breaks down. My primal astrology animal is a kangaroo, and my spirit animal is a horse. I like the second one better.   

Nuning: My name is Nuraini Juliastuti, or Nuning for short. I am a writer and researcher, mainly around arts organization, activism, illegality, and alternative cultural production. Apart from deeply hanging out intellectually and non-intellectually with my KUNCI fellows, my husband and I run Reading Sideways Press, which is a small press we developed to publish works and translations on arts, sports, and literature. In 2020, I joined Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and began work on a postdoctoral fellowship titled “Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation.” Writing is the main outcome of my practice, though thinking with clarity feels like a challenge at times. Writing satisfies my personal urges to theorize about things and events that have shaped me. These range from big things to small things—such as drawing and baking with my daughter, to looking at flowers on the street. Looking forward to the conversation!

Bing: Hi everyone! I’m Bing. I think laughing and eating well are of utmost importance. I like to write, read, and have engaging conversations. I appreciate honesty and idiosyncrasy, and am eternally devoted to fashion and K-pop. My practice facilitates creative assemblages of art, writing, ideas, and contexts. Currently, this takes the form of publications and programs.

I think a good place to start this conversation is with the School of Improper Education (SoIE), which KUNCI founded in 2016. The school’s open call states that “the meaning of authority in knowledge production will be scrutinized.” Learning (and more importantly unlearning) is done collectively and without predetermined outcomes like a grade, ranking, or certificate. In SoIE, a teacher becomes a student, and vice versa. Effort is made to do away with the presumed hierarchy or superiority of any particular figure or subject matter. This led me to think of [Jacques] Rancière (a significant reference point for all of us here), who once said that one should never “presuppose the imbecility of the viewer.”¹ SoIE is, therefore, in my understanding, characterized by contingency and embodied process. I understand, for example, that in the past, you’ve learned sign language together. What are some interesting “classes” that you’ve taken part in over the years? Have there been moments when there was a breakdown or dispute in the communication/transmission of knowledge, and what did you learn from that experience?

Dina: I have been thinking more and more about the School of Improper Education, especially since the pandemic started, and I get more energized whenever I remember interesting SoIE “classes” or moments—for example, our very first meetings, when we arrived at the decision to learn sign language. One of these lasted for three hours, although initially we agreed to finish in one and a half or two hours. I remember that we started from the shared position of not knowing. Not knowing what we can do together. Not knowing what each person wants from school and beyond. But we kept talking and listening to each other. We wrote a lot down on Post-it notes. We insisted on making connections between words, concepts, and people. Finally, we collectively decided to learn sign language. It felt great. It felt like we were operating as one big, collective brain.

Here is my note from that meeting, but unfortunately it’s in Bahasa Indonesia.

Maybe other people have different memories of interesting SoIE classes or moments? Regarding moments of breakdown, maybe it’s more about moments of breaking down. Like what we are experiencing now during the pandemic. I feel like the physical distancing made it difficult for the school to operate, because we relied a lot on gathering and doing things together in the same place at the same time. Perhaps we need to figure out how to better use the digital space for this purpose? Maybe. But personally, I often feel screen fatigue from working too much on the computer.

Ferdi: I have difficulty responding to the question, as I haven’t been there myself when this has happened (or, actually, since the school was founded). So I can only share my impressions of things that I saw unfolding, through the many traces of the school on our blog and via other means of publication, and our conversations on WhatsApp and video calls. I remember that in the beginning, the atmosphere was kind of “sticky” with apprehension. A weird thing to say considering that all of this, for me, was experienced virtually—rather than physically in terms of sharing the space with others in Yogyakarta. I think this was because the idea of “not knowing” also applied to us as the school’s organizers. Despite the fact that we had already read Rancière’s text, we did not feel more prepared per se. Not only were we not quite sure how to hold space for the students to explore “not-knowingness,” we did not necessarily know how to respond to the simplest questions—such as, “What is it that we are trying to do?” This is not to say that we did nothing when faced with this difficult question. As Dina already explained, the collective decision to learn sign language shows our generosity toward each other. It was a way of relinquishing the power of knowledge from its holder. We realized that no one was in the know, and tried to hold onto that feeling and continue together.

I guess the moments of breakdown are interwoven through all of this: the excitement when things finally seemed to be going somewhere; the disappointment upon realizing that this “somewhere” was not really “anywhere” (what is it about knowledge that is so territorial?); the tenacity of holding onto speculation and attending to uncertainties as modes of studying; the relief that while things continued to simmer, they never ended up spilling over.

Mind you, this was in the very early stages of the school. There is a stark contrast to what came up later on, when existing power structures (privilege and lack of privilege) emerged as a springboard in our thinking about how and what knowledge can be produced. Not knowing and the accompanying tensions seem to lose their urgency when we turn the school inside out and look toward working with communities.

Nuning: I always need to remind myself that the idea of the school emerged from our wholehearted intention to navigate the unknown areas and feelings that we experienced nineteen years after KUNCI was born, and twenty years after Reformasi. Embracing the unknown has been key to our work since the beginning. In light of this, learning sign language—in conjunction with reading Rancière’s text on [Joseph] Jacotot—seemed very apt. Apart from the idea of speculating regarding the uncertainties that Ferdi mentioned, there is also humility and resilience in our invitation to take up uncertainties, and maximize them as avenues to keep on moving and living. My personal reflection on the school also points to another matter: KUNCI’s habit, or tactical device, of nurturing space for experimentation. In our recent collaborative writing for Ugly Duckling Presse’s pamphlet series, we likened the idea of the school to slowness, but it’s the kind of slowness that is infused with an atmosphere of “radical patience.” Since 1999, we have changed how we describe ourselves at least three times. In the latest rendition, the concept of “vernacular education” is transformed into “collectivizing study.” Our main idea remains that we are always driven to deflate education and eschew the professionalization of intellectual thought. 

When I read the many notes, essays, and poems written by the school’s participants, in preparation to write an introduction for the school report book (published by KUNCI in 2019), I got the impression that learning sign language was like a shock device. In the participants’ attempts to embrace the invitation to engage with uncertainties (through joining the school), learning sign language created productive opportunities to articulate what uncertainty means and to explore the usefulness of having such a “blurry” space as the School of Improper Education. Like Ferdi, I am also part of KUNCI’s diaspora, forced to disengage from physical presence as the main medium for communication. I do not take for granted the opportunity to write an essay reflecting on other people’s reflections about the school.

I think an interesting phase of the school was when we practiced the “Turba” (Turun ke Bawah) method.² My observation, based on the participants’ notes, was that the Turba method provided an opportunity to reflect on what “under” means in relation to studying practices. Turba emerged as a kind of visitation mode, which led to learning about diverse ways of living in unfamiliar contexts. It pointed to the meaning of “community” (always a valuable concept) and the possibility of a new way of living.

Bing: In your responses, you’ve touched on ideas and practices that are central to KUNCI: togetherness, community, and collectivity. I recall reading a published conversation between members of KUNCI, The Showroom (London), and Casco (Utrecht) about the informal, affective, and intangible notions of KUNCI’s collective organization—such as friendship, hanging out, porous involvement/membership, and the necessity of domestic work like buying toilet paper (which the text was titled after!).³ What do you think is unique or particular about KUNCI’s collectivity in Yogyakarta, or even Indonesia, and how does this translate (or not) to other international contexts? (For example, in KUNCI’s recent projects abroad in Hong Kong or Kampala) 

Ferdi: Another good question that is not so easy to answer. It’s hard for me to articulate this “uniqueness” because 1) I am too deep in the experience, making it quite hard to put it into words, and 2) I don’t know how to say it without sounding too full of myself. Maybe I can highlight one particular moment. It was during our twentieth anniversary in August 2019. We had a bit of a party, or selametan in the Javanese tradition, where we invited close friends and community members for a meal and celebration. The theme of that event was 20 tahun KUNCI: Sama-sama belajar, belajar sama sama (a play on words that roughly translates as “20 years of KUNCI: Together studying, studying together”).

There was a brief moment before dinner when we invited all of the guests to form a big circle in our yard and to share their impressions or reflect together with us about the years that have passed. One of our new members, Rifky Akbar Pratama, or AP, gave a short speech about how he felt being the “fresh blood” in the collective. I was so astounded by the speech, I asked him to send the script to the rest of us. Entitled “As Far as I Know,” it conjured a poignant image of what our collective can become. I quote a part of it here (with the hope that my English translation will do justice to the original text’s poetics): 

“I chose authenticity of experience as a key term, because as far as I know, that’s what sets KUNCI apart from other organizations. Something that, as far as I can tell, makes comparisons unreliable. After all, can’t idiosyncrasy or uniqueness only be measured against itself? As far as I know, the authenticity of experience is very close to the term rasa (feelings)—something that is easier to practice than to theorize about. It opens up the possibility for us to ask, “Is it possible to use feelings as the starting point for knowledge?” It opens up the possibility to pause, and to not rush toward rationalization. As far as I know, folks who are so afraid to show such feelings and raw emotions often hide behind intellectualization—or “defense mechanisms,” as they are called in psychology. These people have difficulty accepting openness, vulnerability, and also love, because they are too dependent on their head’s contents. As far as I know, KUNCI’s not like that. As far as I know, it is open and not forceful, and yet it is faithful to keeping secrets. It opens its hands to my generation, which tends to avoid fixation on the greatness of the past and refuses to bear shame for past failures. KUNCI, as far as I know, makes manifest Uncle Mao’s teaching, “A master who is too strict has no disciples; water which is too pure has no fish.”

Nuning: The question about uniqueness always forces us to think about what shapes us from the inside as well as from the outside. In the beginning, KUNCI was established as a space for cultural studies. We realized that what we are actually doing is escaping from the limitations and prior understandings of what “cultural studies” means. We appropriate the established meaning of cultural studies, and at the same time, seek to build our own ways to be “amateur intellectuals” (as Edward Said posited in Representations of the Intellectual, 1996).⁴ By “amateur intellectuals,” I mean we move freely in and out of formal institutions. This flexible positionality gives us a certain kind of freedom to avoid fixations (back to AP’s poem, which Ferdi mentioned) and, in our case, to avoid professionalization. We don’t want to specialize in a certain field; rather, we want to have faith in what we deem valuable. 

Bing: I really appreciate KUNCI’s epistemic humility and sensitivity. To pick up on the point about “fresh blood,” how has it been to organize and think together with the younger generation? And as a somewhat paradoxical follow-up question to my earlier query on particularity, are there any projects, collectives, artists (in any field) you feel resonate with KUNCI? 

Dina: I think humility is an important idea to raise here. Humility is an important position that we take when we work with and relate to others. Regardless of organizational age (who has been with the organization since the beginning, middle, or more recently), everyone arrives with their own experience and expertise. So it’s important to listen and “walk together.” This comes from the Zapatista principle of preguntando caminamos, or “walking as we ask questions.”

It’s important to always have assumptions checked, and to have intentions shared and clarified. Can the collective support each member’s personal quest in life and practice? In what ways do we not provide this support, and therefore need to respect each other’s personal space? This process requires a lot of conversation, and as a collective with members from different walks of life, places, and even time zones, sometimes we feel out of touch with others. But that’s also okay because there is an implicit trust that we can always talk whenever it is needed. Although this trust needs to be maintained too.

With regards to generational difference, there were some discussions that emerged (in KUNCI and other forums) on how certain issues, such as precariousness, privilege, or mental health, are more actively raised by the younger generation. Rather than pegging these issues as the concerns of one age group, I guess it is more fruitful to use them as an entry point to comparing material conditions in different time periods, and to see what has changed and what remains. So intergenerational dialogue needs to be maintained in order to study forms of togetherness together.

On projects, collectives, and artists that I feel have resonated with KUNCI—actually, there are a lot. Partly because I feel that, in KUNCI, we want to nurture relations. The framework of being a “vanguard,” which I find a lot in the arts, is dangerous. I feel that we are indebted to the people who came before us, who are here with us now, and who are yet to come. Being in the Arts Collaboratory network has put us in touch with groups of shared affinity. I learn from groups who also do collective study, such as Read-in, or self-publishing initiatives like Taller Producción Editorial, Display Distribute, Kerjasama59, Zine-ah!, and libraries like C20 library & collabtive, Kineruku. Another organization that resonates with KUNCI is dislocate. These groups and initiatives have shown how collective publishing, studying, and organizing are entangled while constantly having various feet (not just two) in different disciplines and sociopolitical movements. I think there are many unnamed communities with important practices that resonate with ours, like reading circles among workers (including migrant workers in Taipei and Hong Kong), groups who are fighting for their land rights and rights to live, student presses, and many more. If I list all of them, this text will look like a shout-out section in an album.

Ferdi: There are also a lot of groups, artists collectives, and organizations around the world that have initiated school(-ish) initiatives that I find fascinating, like Ahmet Öğüt’s The Silent University, Al Maeishah, which is an itinerant communal-learning platform, and Gudskul, which is co-initiated by ruangrupa in Jakarta. There are also those I see as our epistemic allies, such as Crater Invertido in Mexico City and Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. Long-term collaborations by the likes of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and Raqs Media Collective, 16 Beaver group artist-run initiative in New York, and the bygone Dutch queer collective Strange Fruit have also become sources of inspiration. 

With regards to generational differences, I think it is an important (tacit) policy of ours not to shove them under the proverbial carpet. As a matter of fact, this also applies to other differences based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, ethnicity, race, and ability. I think we try to constantly engage with these issues through what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms “difference without separability,”⁵ that is, a sociality, or mode of coexistence that moves away from the grip of Cartesian determinacy. It invites us to think through what brings us together and what can we do with these diverse (be-)longings, while at the same time acknowledging that what sets us apart never fully defines who each of us is. 

This proposition also helps us to think in terms of the time that we have together now as all of the time any of us has left. This may differ according to the different chronological age of each KUNCI member. But this notion of ongoing urgency has helped us in turning our past personal baggage (achievements and failures as AP described it in his poetic speech, and I would add, joy and trauma), present struggles, and future uncertainties into a means of intimating collective well-being.

Bing: The idea of epistemological humility has recurred in our conversation. At this point, I think it is important to note that KUNCI does not fetishize the nostalgia of openness, but rather addresses the particular conditions and difficulties of interpersonal relations. In our ongoing experience of the pandemic, the language of “care,” “intimacy,” and “solidarity” has been mobilized, for better or worse, with increasing frequency. It is also interesting to see who is now taking up that type of discourse—but that is another matter. What is your view on a mode of “collectivity,” or “being together,” that might have an inconsistent application in real life? How might one check the privilege of rhetoric?

Nuning: I am growing older with KUNCI, bringing along all my moments of happiness, disappointment, anger, anxiety, and desperation, all the while holding onto hope. Among ourselves, there have been many discussions where we try to define what it means to be together as KUNCI. I like to think about a collectivity that has different shapes—that of friendship, a dysfunctional family, a gang, or maybe even a patch of wild grass. Why are we together? The answers can be so diverse: to expand the scope of our intellectual camaraderie, to be the intellectual and trivial salient support system, to nurture my/our sense of disobedience in times of uncertainty. “Growing older with” can be used as a perspective to view the politics of generational relations in the organization. “Fresh blood” is not just the younger generation, but allies, and friends who I actively look out for. It allows me to regard KUNCI as a lived/embodied experience that is open as a site to theorize or to make abstraction from personal experience. I think the inconsistent applications of “collectivity” and “being together” might happen when an individual/organization using these concepts can’t answer why and how they would use them. Being honest and genuine is the key to knowledge. If we can do that, we can be abstract and concrete at the same time. It takes practice to be able to do that—a certain kind of practice where we need to persevere in the face of temptation from various acts of validation. Collectivity is collectivity, being together is being together. But we need to remember that neither can be easily formalized. They can also mean and be known as different things altogether. 

Dina and Ferdi already mentioned a number of independent organizations that I also like. Recently I have been observing the works of The Black School (New York), The Feminist Memory Project by Nepal Picture Library (Kathmandu), Pathshala South Asian Media Institute (Dhaka). I also like following the works of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance and Aboriginal Tent Embassy. 

I feel that your previous question about “working and thinking together with the younger generation” closely relates to the next question about the discourse and application of “collectivity” and “being together.” It makes me think about the history of youth in Indonesia, and how it always follows the generational timeline. Each generation is imagined to contribute something to that history. The members of KUNCI have their own needs, and these needs serve as a guide to our future. As we are becoming together, we learn that these needs are rooted in our histories. This should be emphasized because we might not get this character in other modes of collectivity. On the other hand, it is dangerous to frame everything in terms of “collectivity” and “being together.” We don’t need to wait until certain concepts or categorizations pop up to define what we feel or think about ourselves. Instead, I’d like to propose apprehension as a tool to check the privilege of one’s rhetoric. We are rich enough with histories to produce our own keywords, words that enable us to critically review our condition.

Ferdi: I hope that what we have been telling you so far about being together, collectivity, etc. does not come across as too fuzzy-wuzzy, because these ideas are not only crafted through time and labor but also built upon tensions and conflict. I often think about what terms and discourse have been left untouched by colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. The limits of this rhetoric lie in the experience: while somehow throughout the years we have been able to hone the capacity to red-flag hogwash, often we don’t allow this intuition to stop us from saying yes, for example, to an invitation to collaborate (though it also really depends if we have the energy to do so or not). I am thinking now about hospitality as a form of hospice-ing, about engaging with unethical and unsustainable practices (what you call “rhetorical”?) toward enabling the dissolution of these very practices. 

Bing: What a beautiful cake! I was planning on visiting Jogja for KUNCI’s 20th anniversary after Ferdi mentioned it to me, but sadly the timing didn’t work out.

I don’t think KUNCI is “fuzzy-wuzzy” at all, or if it is, only in the best possible way! I appreciate your mentions of “apprehension” and “hospice-ing,” because I think they underscore KUNCI’s willingness to go through the process of collaboration, and emerge with an understanding of the difficulties, insecurities, and complicit actions that possibly come along with that collaboration. The suggestion (from Nuning, Gita, and Dina) to have a conversation rather than do an interview for post already speaks to KUNCI’s admirable self-reflexivity in that regard.

This might be a sudden pivot, but your most recent set of responses makes me think of the time when someone told me that a job interview and a date are totally different and cannot be compared. I would beg to differ. I feel like all work, especially cultural work, is about personal appraisal. Or, put otherwise, being a blank canvas or an empty vessel are luxuries that not everyone can afford. Yes, working or being together can build trust and political solidarity, but the intimacy of that process can also be leveraged and manipulated to nefarious ends. I don’t mean to sound morbid—only respectful of the resilience and time it takes to develop a fortified practice like KUNCI’s! 

Nuning: We had a two-day meeting (deep hanging-out sessions) last week to talk about what we should do next. On the first day, we divided ourselves into four groups of three to four persons each. In these “triangle” and “square” meetings, each of us talked about our struggles with matters of personal importance. Dina, AP, and I were in the same group. The need to do something together is as real as the need to be left alone and have personal, autonomous space. I noted down the following sentences:

• “KUNCI, which serves as the anchor and the room to play”
• “the need for activities that function both as a playground and space of companionship”
• “The need for articulation and documentation/documenting ourselves”
• “resonansi metode,” or methods that resonate (with others)
• publishing as a friend
• grounded intellectuals/tentacular scholars (scholars with many footings), and
• cross-territories translation.

There was also a conversation about the (collective) ghost of the present and the future, which emerges in the form of family and personal struggles. At the end of Day 2, we spent time thinking through keywords/findings generated in Day 1. We came up with a clearer way to think about KUNCI/ourselves through the words “Study” and “Forum” attached in our current definition. Studying and collective tooling emerged as two layers of our intellectual collective works. I feel like I am not really providing a final comment here. I am only presenting the main takeaway, or what really stays with me after the KUNCI meeting. I thought that this resonated with our current conversation. 

Ferdi: I just want to say how I always appreciate having these conversational moments with friends like you, Bing. While articulating, naming, and defining our experiences and practices as a collective is not easy to do, being in conversation with folks like you and others who do not just bombard us with ready-made questions, but rather really listen and make use of these moments as a means to build knowledge together, is precious. Personally, every time this kind of conversation takes place, it’s compelling to see how past understandings and ongoing events gain new meanings through different encounters and forms of interlocutions. Sharing a story becomes an event in itself, and experiences are not just being conveyed and represented but also created. Speaking with the collective “hat” back on, for us, a conversation such as this one is an important tool in reconfiguring ourselves, again and again.

Dina: To me, this deep conversation serves as a reminder of why we are here today, and it invokes a nostalgia for things that are not yet here but perhaps already there in the future. I am grateful to share it with Ferdi, Nuning, and you, Bing. Actually, while we were editing this text (up to March 2021), we were still in the middle of our annual meeting to talk about what should be done next—referring to Nuning’s notes of reflection above. In other organizations, annual meetings like this are usually held at the beginning of the year. After having five “annual” meetings this year alone, I made a joke that KUNCI’s so-called annual meeting might last for the rest of the year! The joke is funnier in Bahasa Indonesia. But I share it here anyway to show our endurance, persistence, and apprehension while dealing with complexity. I hope that the others who read this will find their strengths too.

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Wong Binghao: Linh, I feel like this interview is one of many conversations that we have had, and will continue to have, since we first met in 2018 at the TransCuratorial Academy in Phnom Penh, which was co-organized by KfW Stiftung and Sa Sa Art Projects. Many of the artists and cultural workers—from Vietnam and elsewhere—who you have kindly introduced to me since then know you fondly by the nickname “Nokia,” because you are so good at connecting people! I think we both appreciate the value of meeting and learning from fellow cultural practitioners through international residencies, travel, exchange programs, and the like. How important is the international encounter or network to your practice? What has this mode of engagement enabled or facilitated for you?

Đỗ Tường Linh: Thank you so much for thinking of me this way, with that cute nickname. Though I hope that my wish to exchange ideas and inspirations with others doesn’t just touch on the surface of things but continues to enable me to grow and connect on a deeper level.

Having grown up in post–Đổi Mới Vietnam in the 1990s, I am part of the first generation of Vietnamese creatives to realize the importance of the access afforded by the Internet and social media. For example, my first foray into Hanoi’s art world was when I wrote a personal art blog in 2005. Some local artists read my blog and invited me to art events around the city. During this period, my most memorable experiences were at Hanoi Campus, a short-lived residency space founded by two American businessmen, Eric Berg and Bernard Wang, in 2006. The curator of Hanoi Campus at that time, Marcus Mitchell, was one of the first curators I met and befriended.

International artists were invited to be in residence at Hanoi Campus for at least three months. The space also attracted many local artists and audiences. Knowing that most local artists did not speak English, which made intercultural communication and collaboration difficult, I volunteered to help out by mediating conversations between artist and curator, translating, and making relevant connections between contexts. Since then, I have organized and co-organized hundreds of talks, events, workshops, seminars, meetings, and cultural exchanges, as well as assisted foreign curators when they were doing research in Vietnam. This has helped to shape my understanding of a bigger global art world, and the dynamics and politics within the local scenes that might be tailored to a certain taste.

The mid-2000s was a blooming period of international art and cultural projects in Vietnam. I feel extremely privileged to have experienced events like Saigon Open City [2006], Ho Chi Minh City’s first art biennial, and the Flying Circus Project [2007]. Later, in 2009, I participated in my first international residency in Beijing as part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project [2009].

From 2005 to 2015, I worked for commercial galleries, private art foundations, alternative art spaces, foreign cultural institutions, and NGOs. This diverse experience gave me a broad and solid understanding of contemporary art and the sociocultural landscape of Southeast Asia. In September 2015, I moved to London to study contemporary art and art theory at SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies], and since then, my network has broadened—not only because of the university’s diverse cultural environment, but also because of my relative access to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States.

I feel blessed to work in this field and with so many other creative and intellectual individuals around the world who share my curiosity and desire to learn and connect with others. Just like how we met in 2018 and kept the conversation going—there is a mutual support and exchange between me and the international artists, curators, and scholars I have met over the years. Even though many of my past projects were executed with little funding or infrastructure, my collaborators and I still managed to work things out because of the invisible bond and solidarity that we have built over the years.

WBH: The connections you’ve facilitated have absolutely been intentional and long lasting! Speaking of connections, in 2015, together with artist and art educator Le Giang, you co-founded Six Space, an educational, dialogic, and collaborative platform. In a recent interview with Quynh Pham, Assistant Professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco, you describe Six Space as a “communal house with alternating hosts, where ideas are being cooked up without being rushed into a finished product.”¹ You and Giang adapt to project demands and extant circumstances rather than blindly conform to “standards” of display and exhibition. I appreciate the confidence it takes to refine an ethos in this manner. Recently, Six Space organized The Bolero Effect [2019], a live art performance of theater, music, and movement, at a private house in the center of Hanoi, and Citizen Earth [2020], an exhibition at the University of Science in Hanoi. Could you share more about these projects, and what drew you to work site specifically in the context of Hanoi?

DTL: Although Six Space has had a physical space since 2015, we don’t want to just mount exhibitions. In the past, we noticed that people would come to the shows and leave without much emotional or intellectual engagement. We feel that exhibitions are most effective when they are accompanied by public engagement programs, and so we conducted workshops, film screenings, discussions, talks, etc. alongside the exhibitions. By doing this, we hope to reach audiences outside the bubble of contemporary art.

I have always been drawn to site-specific spaces rather than to typical white cubes. I guess I was inspired by my early engagement with the historic Nhà Sàn Studio and Ryllega art gallery, two important avant-garde alternative art spaces in Hanoi that operated from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Being in those spaces taught me that contemporary art has the ability to trigger the social, cultural, and political significance of a site—and hence to facilitate happenings and encounters.

Both of the projects you mention are quite complex and contain nuanced meanings, but I hope I can summarize the main ideas in my response. Conceived by artist Moi Tran, who is of British and Vietnamese-Chinese ancestry, The Bolero Effect was an experimental theater performance that prioritized the notion of community. The performance explored how nhạc vàng [yellow or gold music], or what we now call bolero music, has shaped sociopolitical and public-private relations between Vietnam and its global diaspora. This genre of prewar music was deemed to be melancholic, sentimental, and apolitical, and was thus banned by the Northern communist government during the revolutionary period. After 1975, this style of music continued to have significant cultural influence in the lives of Vietnamese living overseas. Post–Đổi Mới, it experienced a resurgence in Vietnam and was renamed “bolero music.” One of the most important aspects of this project was a performance by Lộc Vàng, who was imprisoned for a decade for being a nhạc vàng singer.

Although Moi Tran and I only had about two and a half months of lead time, we had previously worked together in London and Taipei, and shared a vision, aesthetic, and concept that could be applied to this project. We quickly decided that the project should happen in a public and unconventional space, one not commonly used for art or theater. We chose a private house that was special because of its location near the historic Temple of Literature and Hanoi’s central railway station, and its interior design, which combines French colonial, Eastern European, and Vietnamese influences, reflecting Hanoi’s unique transitional aesthetic. This aesthetic was very important to the artist and project as it alluded to the hybrid identity of Vietnamese diasporas.

We did an open call to cast community performers. Although they were all nonprofessional actors and singers, after more than one month of being together and engaging with a conceptually unfamiliar art piece, they were fully immersed in the performances. I find this transformative aspect of contemporary art very rewarding.

Similarly, with Citizen Earth, I was quick to choose the venue when I first conceptualized and envisioned the project. During the French colonial era, the University of Science was the first university to be established in Indochina. It was called the Université indochinoise, and was the first building to feature the Indochine architectural style invented by French architect Ernest Hébrard. Within the university, there are a small natural history museum and a biology museum with artifacts and taxidermy collected and categorized by the French scientists who first arrived in Vietnam in 1906. Also noteworthy is a huge mural painting by Victor Tardieu, co-founder of the Indochina University of Fine Arts, in the university’s main lecture hall.² By situating this project in such a beautiful and historical venue, we hoped to interrogate perceptions and positions within postcolonial environments. We are currently working on a film that documents the process of realizing this project.

WBH: Through exhibitions that you have curated, such as The Foliage 3 [2019]³ at the VCCA [Vincom Center for Contemporary Art] in Hanoi, and No War, No Vietnam [2018] at Galerie Nord / Kunstverein Tiergarten in Berlin, with Veronika Radulovic and Veronika White, you promulgate a critical diversity in terms of who and what can be thought of as “Vietnamese,” and unmoor any monolithic idea of “Vietnam” from reductive stereotypes of war, poverty, corruption, censorship, etc. You are also connected to, and collaborate frequently with, diasporic Vietnamese artists. At this point, I feel it is important to stress that you do not discard a sense of belonging or identity. Rather, you intently engage with the specific context of Vietnam while simultaneously nudging at its borders. How have audiences and peers, either in Vietnam or abroad, reacted to this approach?

DTL: Thank you for your thoughtful observation. I would like to be regarded as a curator from Vietnam who does not feel restricted by the label “Vietnamese curator.” I think this is a struggle shared by many cultural and art practitioners from non-Western contexts. I do hope that my projects are perceived based on their rigorous artistic and intellectual merit rather than my origin. I feel like I have created a balance in my career: For the first ten years, I built trust and collaborations within Vietnam and Asia, and for the past five years, I have broadened my vision to other places—to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. I have the support of the creative community in Vietnam, who I can always go back to for advice, as well as my wider international network. Because I naturally desire to embrace differences and harmonize opposites, I often feel like a cultural translator between various contexts. There are times when I have been both “inside” and “outside” a cultural milieu. I also deeply value and seek to facilitate grassroots solidarity between the art community and other disciplines, such as science, anthropology, sociology, politics, and business. I don’t mean to romanticize art and cultural labor, as I have had many difficult and conflicting experiences. But above all, it has been a very enriching and meaningful journey.

WBH: This methodology of traversal carries over, in my understanding, to your archival and academic research, which you’ve presented at forums such as Tate Modern’s conference Axis of Solidarity: Landmarks, Platforms, Futures [2019]. Could you share more about your research for this or other platforms, and how it might relate to or influence your curatorial practice?

DTL: In my paper titled “Contested Solidarity: Against Amnesia towards past and future,” I examined the historical art and cultural exchanges between Vietnam and Cuba, specifically in relation to a 2016 exhibition staged in Hanoi and titled “A Present Retrospective.” This exhibition introduced works by Cuban artist René Mederos [1933–1996] made between 1969 and 1972 that depict Vietnam. Alongside were works by five Vietnamese contemporary artists—Lê Quý Tông, Phạm Khắc Quang, Nguyễn Nghĩa Cương, Nguyễn Thế Sơn, and Giang Nguyễn—that respond to Mederos’s works. The show was initiated by Mederos’s grandson Marcelo Jerome Brociner and curated by Claire Driscoll at her space in Hanoi called Work Room Four.

Mederos was a prominent Cuban poster artist and graphic designer who was assigned by the Cuban government to travel to Vietnam in the late ’60s and ’70s to paint scenes of the war to show solidarity between the two countries. Besides creating important works, such as Vietnam Shall Win [1972], Soldiers Taking Aim [1969], and portraits of Ho Chi Minh, his works are also featured in TRIcontinental magazine, which was produced by OSPAAAL [Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, & Latin America], a political movement founded in Havana in 1966.

Through this body of research, I wanted to think about ways of “delinking,” in Walter Mignolo’s terms,⁴ Vietnam’s colonial connections to the empires of China, France, and the United States. Instead, I tried to find connections between Vietnam and Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. Surprisingly, the more I looked, the more I discovered fascinating stories about these “Global South” connections.

My connection with Cuba is quite personal. While studying Spanish at university, I learned that the majority of Vietnamese Spanish speakers studied in Cuba. There were more Vietnamese studying in Cuba than in Spain because of the Global South connection. I finally traveled to Cuba in 2016 and was lucky enough to meet many interesting artists and creatives in Havana. I sympathize with Gerardo Mosquera’s observation that it is much more difficult for curators from the “Global South” to travel to one another’s countries than it is for European curators to travel to other parts of the world.⁵ I hope to be back to Cuba one day soon to collaborate with a Cuban curator on some projects.

WBH: You’ve worked closely with a number of senior—some might even say “modern”— artists like Trương Tân, Trần Lương, Nguyễn Minh Phước, Đinh Thị Thắm Poong, and Nguyễn Văn Cường, as well as with younger contemporary artists, some of whom have only recently graduated from schools around the world. What is the difference, for you, between working with these two demographics? What do you learn from them respectively?

DTL: In the context of Vietnam, the older generations share knowledge and experiences through casual meetings or hanging out. It has become a unique culture and trait of the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in Hanoi. Artists and students always hang out at the tea shop around the corner from the school. When I was studying art history there from 2007–11, these intimate conversations and discussions complemented my education in the classroom and challenged my ways of thinking about history, politics, and the arts.

My generation and younger ones are fortunate to be able to travel more easily and we have better access to Western art and educational institutions. This could be considered both an advantage and a disadvantage. For example, those educated in Western institutions might miss out on other ways of thinking and learning, such as the ones I learned through informal and intergenerational conversations at the tea shops. These knowledges cannot be easily captured in a textbook or formal discourse.

It is not always easy for artists of different generations to have a platform for exchange, unless they are born into an artistic family. In my projects, I try to initiate and create these intergenerational exchanges and connections to bridge the gaps.

WBH: By way of a “conclusion” to this particular conversation, and after briefly discussing your many varied endeavors, I’d like to invoke more curiosity and discovery: What is a project—or space, collective, artist, etc. —that you feel has not yet gotten the attention it deserves, and why? And a follow-up question: What are you currently working on that our readers can look forward to in the near future?

DTL: I think The Appendix collective, a group of six creatives from different professions, founded in Hanoi in 2010, is doing very important projects both in Vietnam and regionally in Southeast Asia. They curated an exhibition titled Skyline with Flying People 4, in which artworks were displayed inside a storage complex on the outskirts of Hanoi from November 2020 to January 2021. There were twenty-nine exhibiting artists, each of whom presented a single work. Out of these works, nine were site-specific commissions. All visits to this show were by appointment only due to the storage facility’s policy. Information about the show was circulated only through word of mouth. This storage service, advertised as a professional, Westernized archiving system, was only made available in Vietnam about three years ago. As such, I feel that the project prompted reflections on what makes an artwork different, or not, from a consumer good.

I think that The Appendix thinks about and conceptualizes projects in their own way, without referring to any standard system of knowledge. Their ideas might not appeal to the general public or international art world, but maybe that is precisely collective’s intentions: a refusal to be understood or discovered; a desire to remain on the “margins.” I think the project made a very subtle political gesture by refuting the need to overly position or define an artwork. It reminded me of Gabi Ngcobo’s decision not to label artworks in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2018. Art can sometimes be left in obscurity and anonymity.

Currently, like most cultural workers, I am not able to travel internationally due to the pandemic. This is a blessing in disguise as the situation in Vietnam is relatively under control. I took this as an opportunity to revisit artists, meet new artists, and help to develop a few art projects and spaces. For example, I currently serve as curator for Mo Art Space, a brand-new space run by a young team of twenty-something creatives. There has always been a gap between the commercial art galleries and the alternative art spaces in Hanoi. Commercial art galleries are often associated with saleable paintings and sculptures, while experimental art spaces exhibit more “inaccessible” media like installation, performance, and video art. Most collectors of contemporary art in Vietnam are foreigners, and a lot of contemporary art production here is based on international funding. I hope that Mo can nurture a new generation of artists and local collectors. I also hope to develop another discursive art platform like the one that I previously developed for Sàn Art in 2018. I think learning is a crucial resistance tool against aging. I look forward to fruitful collaborations this year with Veronika Radulovic, Kader Attia, Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Vũ Đức Toàn from The Appendix collective, and a number of young artists. When things are more stable, I hope to be back in London and Berlin to continue projects there. I was also invited by Pascale Obolo to take part in the African Art Book Fair at the Dakar Biennale in 2020, but sadly, it was canceled. I hope to be back on the move again soon.

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