Association of the Arts of the Present:
Old Lands New Ground
Organising Committee- Liz Ho, Yeewan Koon, Edgar Schmitz, Jonathan Eburne and Melissa Karmen Lee
Hong Kong University, Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Art
The 2019 ASAP symposium took place in Hong Kong, a city that embodies the program’s theme ‘Old Lands, New Ground’. Located at one of the most charged historical and geo-political fault lines of the early twenty first century, Hong Kong offers a unique vantage point onto the arts of the present - Hong Kong experiments daily with the competing ideologies, social dynamics, contradictory spatial-temporal impulses, and economic realities of living in the postcolonial complexities of old lands, new ground. In other contexts across Asia, for example, we might consider Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Land Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand to blend artistic and architectural practice to foster social engagement with the ground through agriculture. Lands and grounds might also feature in shamanistic practices, one might think of Park Chan-Kyong’s restaging of Korean shamanistic rituals as a practice in order to evoke community and address collective tragedy. One might also think of futuristic reimpressions/visualisations of groundwork, perhaps in Chinese artist Cao Fei’s RMB City in which a virtual city in China is re-imagined in Second Life. Globally, indigenous movements, ecological precarity and other developmental struggles “ground” the arts of the present in ways that can be productive and unsettling in relation to past, present and future contexts.
Featured Presentations:
Joan Kee: Welcome to Emojiland (You’ll Never Leave)
Monica Steinberg: Art Provoking Law: Uncivil Obedience and the Unsettling of Immigration law
Jeff Clapp: We are Data!: Twee Surveillance in July and Heti
https://english.hku.hk/events/asap2019/program.htm
Keynote Performances / Lectures
Sarah Morris: No Inside Outside
Patty Chang: Milk Debt
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