Symposium: We Can’t Forget How to Move - Panel Abstract
20 July 2022, 12:00–2:00pm (London) / 6:00–8:00pm (Bangkok)
Format: online via Zoom (register here)
Speakers: Nikita Choi, Hou Hanru, Ole Scheeren, Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen, Mia Yu, Anthony Yung, moderated by David Morris and Wing Chan
Presentations
I. Archiving 'Cities on the Move'
Anthony Yung
Asia Art Archive has worked with 'Cities on the Move' co-curator Hou Hanru to organise and digitise the archive of the exhibition since 2014, which includes research materials gathered during the preparation of the exhibition, ephemera, photo documentation, journalistic reports and reviews, and other primary source material around the different iterations of the exhibition. This presentation will introduce the archive’s processes and potentials, to explore some of the questions the ‘Cities’ archive raises and different ways that it might be activated in the present. See: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/cities-on-the-move-exhibition-archive.
II. Three Contested Sites
Nikita Yingqian Cai, Mia Yu
Since the launching of Three Contested Sites at the beginning of the year, five researchers, Wing Chan (London-Hong Kong), Nie Xiaoyi (Mainland China), Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen (Bangkok), Yueni Zhong (Berlin), Qiuzi Guo (Berlin), and guest research assistant Zhang Jun (Paris), have been conducting extensive documentary research and interviews on the complex itineraries, character trajectories, and work-medium contexts of the three exhibition series China Avant-Garde, Half of the Sky, and Cities on the Move. Through monthly online meetings, the team has shared its thoughts and findings from visits to local institutions, interviews with curators, artists and participants, and intensive readings of archival documents in search of mutual understanding and ways of coexisting in a divided world that reach beyond pandemic segmentations.
Revisiting concepts that marked the decade between 1993 and 2003, such as "Asian Modernization," "Avant-Garde," "Globalization," and "Nation,” may help us to understand the temporal-spatial edges of these sites. The research also introduces decentralized and relational perspectives into the study of exhibition history. The strong impetus to change and relate during a period of globalized optimism spurred on a large number of multi-directional, inadvertent, or intentional mistranslations and misunderstandings. These exhibitions were destined to be sites of contact and controversy, as well as starting points for resonance and hope.
III. Walking through the streets in the 'Cities on the Move 6'
Abstract by Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen
How did 'Cities on the Move 6' connect to the city of Bangkok? As a researcher on this 'event city,' the question becomes a starting point for me to navigate through the 'streets' of Bangkok in parallel modes. It is more like a pendulum between the imaginary streets in the documents and those in which I stroll physically to map what was going on and gradually observe which fragments of memory can be meaningful to our present challenges.
The local street system represents a basic mode of urban living that allows local people or visitors to have a certain freedom to commute, negotiate, and merchandise. However, the degree of freedom to operate in the streets has been a critical factor in balancing the city's position in globalization. The word 'parallel' is, in fact, for the local history of the streets in Bangkok that enfolds one facet of pre-modernization – the former canal system and the concept of living with water. This tentative route walks towards the question of how the event city started to connect with the local network of people. It will also share some observations on the conditions of the archival research, whether they be the condition of the archive at the Secession in Vienna or some private archives in Bangkok. Also, how a series of interviews with 'Cities on the Move 6' participants and European diplomats becomes an essential part of the research.
Respondents
Hou Hanru, Ole Scheeren
About the speakers and respondents
Nikita Yingqian Cai is currently the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Guangdong Times Museum. She has curated such exhibitions as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016) , Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence ( 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Belin, 2019), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019), Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021), and One song is very much like another and the boat is always from afar (2021). She initiated the Para-curatorial series in 2012 and has maintained and expanded the research network of “All the Way South”. She is the co-editor of On Our Times and the host of “Rolling Congee”, and was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019. Her writings have been published by Bard College and the MIT Press, Sternberg Press, Black Dog Publishing, Yishu, Artforum and e-flux. She is the co-editor of Active Withdrawals: Life and Death of Institutional Critique and No Ground Underneath; Curating on the Nexus of Changes.
Hou Hanru, art critic and curator based in Paris and Rome. currently Artistic Director, MAXXI, national museum of 21st century arts, Rome, he has curated a number of internationally known exhibitions, biennales, triennales, etc., notably "Cities On The Move" (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) (1997-2000) that travelled to and reconfigured in Vienna, Bordeaux, New York, Humlebaek, London, Bangkok and Helsinki.
Ole Scheeren is a German-born architect and principal of Büro Ole Scheeren. His landmark projects shape the way we interact with our cities and generate new social narratives through a bold vision of architecture as highly connective and integrative environments. Highlighting the need for transformative solutions to the challenges facing contemporary society, Ole Scheeren’s architecture is characterized by a 25-year commitment to grounding his creative vision in highly successful realized projects, including the completion of three major developments in 2018: the 314m tall MahaNakhon skyscraper in Bangkok, the large-scale DUO mixed-use towers in Singapore, and the Guardian Art Center in the historic center of Beijing. Alongside his award-winning architectural work Scheeren has created exhibition designs for New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Hayward Gallery, contributed to triennials in Beijing and Milan as well as to the Cities on the Move exhibitions in London and Bangkok.
Living in Bangkok, Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen, architect, architectural historian and writer, enjoys exploring the roles of architectural history and theory in contemporary practice. She was the editor of art4d in 2019. She has recently studied human behavior in the urban soundscape while serving as an R&D consultant for the AKUS brand. Her current focus is on the relationship between the production of contemporary art and architecture in Thailand in the 1990s. She completed her architectural history training in Italy. She obtained the Master of Architectural History at the University of Rome III and a doctorate in History of Architecture and Construction at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" – with research on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's works: the architectural production and its material history.
Mia Yu is a Beijing-based art historian and curator. Her research interests include exhibition histories, decolonization, situated ecology in China’s frontier regions, mining, extractive economies and speculative future. Her most recent exhibitions include Three Contested Sites—The Worldly Fables of the Long 1990s co-curated with Nikita Cai at Times Museum, Resonances of One Hundred Things at OCAT Biennale (2021), From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna at Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival (2020), etc. Mia Yu contributed to Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 published by Afterall and Bard College. Currently, Mia Yu directs North x Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges, a long-term para-curatorial project that uses Northeast China (a.k.a. Manchuria) as a departure point to investigate the entanglements between histories of mining, industrial infrastructures, ruins and alternative ecological sensibilities. Mia Yu was nominated for the 14th AAC Curator of the Year Award in 2019. She was the recipient of the Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art in 2018, the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship in 2017 and the winner of the CCAA Art Critic Award in 2015.
Anthony Yung is a senior researcher at Asia Art Archive, specialising in China’s related research projects. He managed AAA’s major research project Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990, which produced 100 interviews with artist, critics, scholars and other participants and collected a large amount of research materials about Chinese contemporary art from the late 1970s to early 1990s.