To give voice to projects and ideas that demand to be heard, AAA once again presents Open Platform with a call to cultural producers and organisers to submit proposals for 28-minute presentations to be held during ART HK 12. This year, we received over 100 proposals; our panel of judges, including Alan Cruickshank, Editor of Broadsheet, Kao Tzu-Chin, Editor of ARTCO, Elaine Ng, Editor of ArtAsiaPacific, and Mark Rappolt, Editor of Art Review, selected four presentations based on diversity of content, originality, format, and relevance to today's world.

 

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents: It's a pleasure to be Here, We Have Nothing to Say: the Anxiety of the Conceptual

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries

Seoul

Artists, when it comes to speaking their minds, have very little if nothing coherent to say. Isn't it strange, then, that thte world (and not just the art world) thinks that artists should have the final word on the meaning of life; that they should get to thrust anything (after all, that's the definition of conceptual art) in your face and know for a fact that, accoording to the rules of art, it's the greatest manifestiation of the human spirit?

 

Art and Spatial Resistance: Emergent strategies in Asia

DOXA

Hong Kong, London, Paris

 

Culture now plays a key role in the global economy where there is the increasing privatisation of space, the alienation of local communities, and the explotitation of creative labor in the process of gentification. In the UK and Europe the economy has burst, leaving urban development projects half completed and an over-saturated job market of young unemployed creative workers. Hong Kong and much of Asia are now developing similarly in order to remain competitve in the global economy through the development of major cultural venues and museums. This talk explores some of the emereging strategies in Asia to resist this kind of rampant development in order to reorganise creativity and redevelop communiteis.

DOXA is a collective started in 2010 by Yul Huui and Ashley Wong in London UK. www.doxacollective.org

 

Edge Public Spaces in Hong kOng

Parallel Lab

Hong Kong

In the economy-driven urban development of Hong Kong, public spaces are becoming more and more insignificant. Nevertheless, in-between this dense urban fabric there exists a fine network of well-hidden spaces, recesses and interstitial paths that contain an infinite richness of spatial appropriation by their inhabitants. Not intended for public use, these so-called 'Edge Public Spaces' nevertheless belong to the public domain and their remote position allows for the veritable expression of freedom and independence. Engaged in this reflection, Parellel Lab considers these buffer zones an opportunity to reveal part of the city's identity.

 

Can Art Become a Catalyst for Social Change in Sri Lanka?

Suresh Jayaram

Banaglore

 

'Becoming' , the theme of the Colombo Art Biennial (CAB) in February 2012, responded to the avant-garde demand for the integration of art nad life. Sri Lankan artists are in a aposition to see visual art as part of radicalism of the global South, from a vantage point that is witness to violence. The exhibiting artists reclaimed a plural space of resistance beyond the polities of religion and cultural homogeneity and the biennial's curators slocated the individual artists as a citizen, with the social responsibitiy to address these issues and seek to make art a apart of 'Social Sculpture.'