Circuits of Performance

This panel will discuss the importance of performance art within the ecology of artist collectives and arts festivals. As part of Asia Art Archive’s public programmes for the exhibition Form Colour Action at AAA Library, Circuits of Performance is inspired by the artist Lee Wen’s work as an arts organiser and a pioneer in the development of performance art in Asia. Lee Weng Choy, David Teh and wen yau—three speakers who work as artists, writers, curators, and educators—will come together for a conversation about how performance art has developed through socially engaged practices and through the circulation of ideas and experimentation supported by arts festivals and platforms.

Moderated by AAA Researcher Chương-Đài Võ, the panel also will explore the broader relevance of performance in the relationship between the arts and social critique.

There will be an exhibition walkthrough at 6pm before the talk.

Free and open to the public with registration.

Lee Weng Choy is President of the International Association of Art Critics’ Singapore Section. Previously, he was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation in Singapore. He has worked on projects with Ilham Gallery and A+ Works of Art, both in Kuala Lumpur, as well as the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and National Gallery Singapore. His writings have appeared in journals such as Afterall, and anthologies including Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. He is working, albeit very slowly, on a collection of his essays on artists, to be titled The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places

David Teh is a curator and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, specialising in Southeast Asian contemporary art. His curatorial efforts have included Unreal Asia (55th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2009), Video Vortex #7 (Yogyakarta, 2011), TRANSMISSION (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014), Misfits: Pages from a Loose-leaf Modernity (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017) and Returns (12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018). Teh’s writings have appeared in journals including Third TextARTMarginsArtforum International and Afterall. His 2017 book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published by the MIT Press, and he was co-editor (with David Morris) of Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98 for Afterall's Exhibition Histories series (2018).

wen yau is a cross-media artist, researcher, curator, and writer. She has focused on performance/live art and social practice in the last few years. Her works often grapple with cultural difference and intimacy in public space. She was a Researcher at Asia Art Archive between 2005 and 2012. She obtained a PhD from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, with her thesis titled Performing Identities: Performative Practices in post-Handover Hong Kong Art and Activism. In 2015–16, she served as Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Performance Studies Department at Northwestern University. 

Chương-Đài Võ is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive, specialising in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Her writing can be found in Afterall Journal, Sismography des luttes (forthcoming), Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s Modern Quarterly, and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

 

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