Asia Art Archive hosts presentations by Martina Köppel-Yang, Zhao Chuan, and Chiang Poshin—the second AAA Researchers-in-Residence for The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Programme.
Martina Köppel-Yang | ”Performing Identity, Cultural Policy, and Artistic Strategies in China, 1978 to Today”
(In residence 16 to 23 June 2018)
The Paris-based scholar and curator’s research focuses on the relation between politics and cultural and artistic strategies. Köppel-Yang’s time at AAA will be used to research the Zheng Shengtian Archive. Her new research project traces the development of different artistic strategies in response to changes in Chinese cultural policy during the last four decades. Assuming that change starts from every individual, Köppel-Yang’s research focuses on significant personalities of the Chinese art world, including artists, curators, and figures in the institutional system.
Martina Köppel-Yang is a member of the editorial board of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, a member of the advisory board of randian, and an academic advisor for Asia Art Archive. Köppel-Yang has published extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art, including Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989 (2003); Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming … (2009); and I Often Do Bad Things: Yang Jiechang, Texts and Works, 1982–2016 (2017). She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including The 5th International Ink Painting Biennial of Shenzhen (2006), "Onda Anomala," Rahmenprogramm Manifesta 7 (Trento, 2008), and The Writings of Today are a Promise for Tomorrow (Venice, 2015).
Zhao Chuan | “Chinese Performance Artists in Asia”
(In residence 7 to 16 June 2018)
The Shanghai-based independent writer and advocate of experimental theatre will use materials in AAA’s Collection to investigate the practice of Asian performance artists of Chinese descent; performance art as a marginal activity that blurs the boundaries between art and society; and the recent revival of performance art, the expanded theatre, and the complex relationship between performative works and museums.
Zhao Chuan is a theatre maker, writer, art critic, and curator based in Shanghai. He is the founding member of the self-organised theatre collective Grass Stage. His major theatrical works include Unsettling Stones (playwright and director, 2012–13); World Factory (playwright and director, 2014–17); and Wild Seed (director and performer, 2018). His writings on contemporary Chinese art have been published in periodicals such as Yishu, Art World (Yishu Shijie), and ARTCO Monthly; and in publications including On Radical Art: The 80s Scene in Shanghai (2014) and The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre (2013). His curatorial projects include Staging Alterity: Dialogues on Different Worlds / Different Theatres at Shanghai Mingsheng Art Museum in 2016; a performance project at OCAT Shenzhen in 2014; and Action Asia, a performance, seminar, and research programme for Rockbund Art Museum from 2011 to 2012.
Chiang Poshin | “What’s Ahead? Reinterpreting Time in Chinese Art Communities in the Context of the Cold War”
(In residence 16 to 23 June 2018)
During the Cold War, there was a short period when Hong Kong and Taiwan (the “free China” as called by some then) were in close contact. Since the late 1950s, poets and painters in these two places used periodicals as a platform to introduce translated materials and debates on modern art. In this residency, Chiang uses the collections of Asia Art Archive and the Modern Literature Archive of CUHK to investigate what Taiwanese artists published in Hong Kong periodicals during the 1960s—revisiting how Chinese-speaking artists reinterpreted “Chinese-ness” and the periodisation of its art history, so as to reclaim a national discourse. The investigation does not aim at organising a pre-history of contemporary Chinese art; rather, it attempts to observe how, during the Cold War, the art community resisted a singular discourse of time, and how a practice of anti-modernism served as a reference for the avant-garde.
Chiang Poshin is Associate Professor in art history at Tainan National University of the Arts, and Director of the Art Archive Center in Taiwan. He is also Chief Editor of Art Critique of Taiwan (ACT), a jury member for the Taiwan National Awards of Art, and Chair of the international jury team for the Taishin Arts Award. Chiang has specialised in Taiwan art history since the 1990s. Recent academic forums and symposia he has organised include Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960–1989), Southeast Asia and Taiwan: Modernity and Postcolonial Manifestations in Visual Art, and The Renaissance of Cultural Memory: Reconstructing Art Histories in Contemporary Taiwan, among others. He is currently working on artistic exchange in East Asia during the modern period, theory and practice of art archives, and the understanding of contemporary in Taiwan art history.
Free and open to the public with registration.
Venue: Asia Art Archive A Space, 10/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan
Sponsor:
