Opening Talks丨An Impulse to Groove and An Impulse to Come Home

Hang Tian was born in 1972 and grew up in the rural area of South Shandong and the coalmine towns of East Hebei. Two of his albums, My Heart Of Blues (1999)and Cold Water on My Head (2002), attempt to connect the life experiences of the grassroots with local social realities by drawing forms from blues. Hang Tian then moved to the United States, left the music scene, and turned to the connoisseurship of Song dynasty ceramics and the practice of calligraphy. In 2015, he returned to the music industry and released the album After Twelve Years (2017). He now lives in Beijing. 

Zhihui Zhang (b.1994), art historian, writer, and translator. She graduated from Wellesley College, with a major in Art History and a minor in Studio Art in 2015. Her undergraduate study focused on East Asian art and modern art. During her master’s studies in Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard University, she studied East Asian modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Zhihui has interned at Christie’s New York and worked at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan as the Elisabeth Luce Moore’24 Wellesley-Yenching Graduate Fellow. She also worked as a research associate at the HONG Media Art Collection of ZKM Center for Art and Media and the Center for Art and Technology at Central Academy of Fine Arts. She co-curated the exhibition “Whatever Works, Whatever It Takes” at Goethe Institut China in 2019. Her writing has appeared on publications such as ARTFORUM China and LEAP, and her translations have been included in publications of the 6^th Guangzhou Triennial and by the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

15:00-16:30 

An Impulse to Come Home丨Artists’ Talks and Conversation

Speakers: 

Cheng Xinhao, Avita Guo, Ma Haijiao, Zheng Yuan

Moderators：

Sun Gaorui, Liu Yusi

Cheng Xinhao (b.1985, Yunnan, China) currently lives and works in Kunming, Yunnan. He received his Ph.D in Chemistry from Peking University in 2013. Focusing on his hometown in the Yunnan Province, Xinhao’s works are usually based on long-term field studies. With videos, installations, photographs and the presence of the author’s body, his works investigate the polyphonic relationships between logic, discussions, knowledge, and the part that nature, society, and history plays within them.

Avita Guo was born in Tibet, grew up in Qinghai and Russia. She received her BA degree in Ilya Repin State Academia of Fine Arts, oil painting. In 2012 she was offered scholarship for MA Fine Art degree in University Arts of London, she graduated from Central Saint Martins college of arts and design in 2015. In 2017 she paused her Mphi/PhD of Material and Visual culture of anthropology in University College of London. In 2017 and 2018, she had experimental personal projects showed in 305 space.

Her current works pay attention on the collapse in between personal inner land and realistic political society, the changes of the political filed and personal position in the modernity at large, the changes of the poetic moments in between inner mind and outer cracks. In 2019 she planed to re-paint again and trying to explore the relationship between painting and her formal video installation experiments.

Ma Haijiao (b.1990, Hebei province, China) studied from 2009 to 2016 at the China Academy of Art, where he gained a BA and then an MFA. He now lives and works in Beijing. His art practice has an enduring concern with the daily “routine” of life, and taking this as his starting point, he traces its logic to shape video narratives and other works. His recent solo exhibition include "Happy Valley II" (Discoveries, Art Basel, Hong Kong, 2019); "Happy Valley" (Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, 2018). His recent group exhibition include "Array: EACA 2019" (Gallery Baton, Seoul, 2019);  "8102: On Reality" (OCAT, Shanghai), “The New Normal”（Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017）; "Why Not Ask Again: The 11th Shanghai Biennale" (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2016)

Zheng Yuan (b.1988, Lanzhou, China) currently lives and works in Beijing. Working primarily with time-based media, his work often operates at the intersection of fiction, documentary, essay, and investigative studies. His practice focuses on identity and evaluation and it’s ever-shifting relationship with history, power, and representation. By introducing archival material, found footage and situations Zheng’s work acquires an interleaved complexity within imbricated contexts.

His recent solo project includes “Up in the Air”, Taikang Space, Beijing, 2017. “An Open Studio” Practice, New York, 2016. He recently participated in group shows including “UN/ CONVENTIONAL: OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Exhibition“, OCAT Shanghai,                      

Shanghai, 2020;  “Be In a Half of Maze” CAA Art Museum, Hangzhou, 2019. He was nominated at the Art Sanya for the Young Chinese Artists Award in 2017. 

Yusi Liu is a researcher of classical archaeology and art. She grew up in Beijing and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 with a double major in Classics and Art History and a minor in European Studies. Her research interests include space and memory, cultural heritage, intellectual history, and classical reception, especially in East Asian contexts. She is particularly interested in the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art, and the methodologies in interpreting such convergence and its relation to the global political sphere. Yusi has received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service, and she has worked at Galerie St. Etienne in New York, the Chazen Museum of Art, the Athenian Agora Excavations, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.