Trust in the Public: Akira Takayama and Kohei Sekigawa in conversation with Yuka Uematsu
Date: 08.08.2020 (Sat)
Time: 6-7:15pm HKT (7-8:15pm JST)
Language: Japanese (closed captioning in English)
Live medium: Zoom, Tai Kwun Contemporary Facebook page & "Watch Party" on Tai Kwun Facebook page
Every day at 3 pm Hong Kong time, the artist Kohei Sekigawa hums for us. With travel restrictions and quarantine requirements, Sekigawa is unable to join us for his One-Minute Events, where he executes a series of performances in an art space using minimal props and settings. He is not live streamed, and we place our trust in him—reaching out across the ocean like the sounding of a vast echo. In another call and response project, the artist and theatre director Akira Takayama's McDonald's Radio University is a roving lecture programme that takes place in McDonald's or their replicas where visitors can access a syllabus using a QR code. The syllabus is composed of scripts written by “professors”—all individuals considered to be “refugees” or “migrants” in their host countries in a collaborative process based on their life experiences.
Yuka Uematsu, curator at The National Museum of Art, Osaka and co-curator of They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary will engage Takayama and Sekigawa in a conversation on performative actions by people often unseen in society, activating the democratic potential of commercial spaces such as fast food joints or creating resonance through intimate distances. With an emphasis on public access in contemporary art spaces, "Trust in the Public" will be centred on the suspension of belief that is necessary in learning how to be together differently.
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Cultural Expectations and Premonitions: Conversation with Agnes Arellano, Ho Tzu Nyen, and June Yap
Date: 12.09.2020 (Sat)
Time: 7-8:30pm
Language: English
Live medium: Zoom, Tai Kwun Contemporary Facebook page & "Watch Party" on Tai Kwun Facebook page
A moon goddess emerges from the gallery floor at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Cast from artist Agnes Arellano's own body, the work was first shown in 1983 as part of her first "inscape" or personal landscape. Haliya Bathing is derived from Bicol mythology and lies at the intersection of the feminine and sacred. Arellano's Haliya is pregnant and posed to give birth. The work gives life, a life that is yet to be determined. Drawing from another form of historicity is Ho Tzu Nyen's EARTH, which the artist describes as "doing painting with video." Drawing from European masters of mythological depiction including Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), Caravaggio's David and Goliath (1599), and Antonine-Jean Gros's Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1804), Ho's work appears to us as premonition of the times we live in now.
June Yap, Director of Curatorial, Collections, and Programmes at the Singapore Art Museum and co-curator of They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary, will be in conversation with artists Agnes Arellano and Ho Tzu Nyen, as moderated by Hera Chan. The conversation will wend about different ways of understanding through acts of translation and creating resonances between art works—particularly in this time of physical isolation. The artist will share about their work in the exhibition as well as their practices at large, thinking together how artists can act as agents of intuition, helping us to guide our understanding of what is yet to come.
The sacred and the mythical, the physical and the erotic, the magical and the mundane, the religious and the profane, and music and song all permeate the art of Filipina artist Agnes Arellano. Drawing from rich personal experience and an extraordinary range of influences, she makes some of the most dramatic art in Asia. Best known for surrealist and expressionist work in plaster (cast and directly modelled), bronze, and cold-cast marble, Arellano's work tends to stress the integration of individual elements into one totality or "inscape". She has participated in international group exhibitions in Fukuoka, Havana, Berlin, Johannesburg, New York, Brisbane and Singapore. Her works are in the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum, and the APEC Sculpture Park by the Naru River, Busan South Korea.
June Yap is Director of Curatorial, Collections, and Programmes at the Singapore Art Museum, where she oversees content creation and museum programming. Her prior roles include Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator (South and Southeast Asia), Deputy Director and Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, and curator at the Singapore Art Museum. Amongst exhibitions she has curated are They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia as part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (2014), The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before, Singapore (2011), Paradise is Elsewhere, Germany (2009). She is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (2016).
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