Friday Night Salon at Tate Modern
Three students undertaking the PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies have organised a series of discussions, presentations and networking sessions at the Tate Modern on Contemporary Chinese Art and Culture.
Three students undertaking the PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies have organised a series of discussions, presentations and networking sessions at the Tate Modern on Contemporary Chinese Art and Culture.
Friday Night Salon at Tate Modern are a series of evenings set aside for presentations, discussion and networking. The Salons were originally envisaged to provide a platform for informal and collaborative research and discussion on contemporary Chinese art and culture, and everyone is most welcome to attend.
21st March: Questioning ‘Chinese’ identity through urban landscapes and film – Desmond Hok-Man Sham and Yiou Penelope Peng
- The first session will look at questions of Chinese identity in concepts of heritage and in film. Desmond Hok-Man Sham will present a paper entitled ‘Problematizing “Chineseness”, Articulating the Heritage of Port Cities in Singapore and Hong Kong’, which aims to interrogate the concept of ‘Chineseness’ through an analysis of the complex histories of the port cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, focusing in particular on the built heritage and urban landscape. The second paper, by Yiou Penelope Peng, is entitled ‘The cinema of revolution: A case study on the Third Cinema in Latin America in the 1960s and Left Wing cinema in China in the 1930s’. Her paper traces the role of cinema in contributing to the reconstruction of national identity in the (semi- and post-) colonialist social discourse in these two seemingly unrelated regions.
28th March: Creating space for art: independent artistic initiatives and cross-cultural communication – Edward Sanderson, Elain W. Ho, and Ting-ting Cheng
- The second salon focuses on contemporary Chinese art. It will start with a paper by Edward Sanderson and Elaine W. Ho, entitled ‘Who Goes and Where art? Measures of Distance in Artistic Research, from here to China’. Their research focuses on independent artistic initiatives and collectives in China, and the ongoing, contested struggle of production, replacement and representation these groups have. There will also be an artist’s talk by Ting-Ting Cheng, a London-based Taiwanese artist. In her work, Cheng analyses language as the symbol of identity in order to examine communication between different cultures. By studying the representation of others in mass media, she explores how British society reacts to ‘foreignness’.
4th April: Li Yuan-chia in retrospective – Guy Brett and Nick Sawyer, with Wei Yu and Kaiwei Wang
- The final salon will focus on the career of Li Yuan-chia, an artist and poet born in China, who lived in Taiwan and Italy before spending the last twenty-eight years of his life in northern England, where he ran the LYC Museum & Art Gallery from 1972 to 1983. To celebrate the artist’s major retrospective, View-Point, at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which opened in early March, this salon features two talks by the co-curators of the show. The long-established art writer and curator, Guy Brett, will situate Li in the art of his time, taking the broadest view possible of the art, both in a geographical sense and in terms of artistic innovation. Nick Sawyer, one of the trustees of LYC Foundation and a life-long friend of Li, will give a talk focusing on the poetry that the artist wrote in English from the time he arrived in London in 1966 up until his death in 1994.
These events are free but registration is required at: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/friday-night-salon-at-tate-modern-contemporary-chinese-art-and-culture-tickets-10855441919
More information can be found on the Salon series website.