Sora Kim, Kan Xuan: Walk Strangely, Stay Strangely

Sora Kim vs Kan Xuan: Walk Strangely, Stay Strangely
December 15, 2018–February 1, 2019
Co-curated by Hou Hanru，Kim Sunjung
Associate Curator: Tan Yue

The ordinary becomes unordinary when artists intervene. They see, discern, and discover something special in the ordinary, and create from and with everyday movements and sounds. They make the seemingly banal acts of walking, staying, and breathing into elements of artworks. In a new, different context, the banality is lost. Sora Kim and Kan Xuan, are two extraordinarily singular, somehow “strange,” female figures of the art scene in Korea and China. Their works, largely distinct in form but echoing each in their ways to probe fundamental questions of the relationship between the artist as a quiet but pungent witness to how the turbulent world reality has impacted and modified the human body and behavior, are invited into a curatorial dialogue among the two artists, two curators and the museum team. This dialogue will generate a softly but firmly intertwined and interacting choreography that turns the museum into a discreet but open platform for carefully planned but essentially unpredictable performances mobilizing both human bodies and digital machines. That outcome of the performances is surely unsure. But once stepped into the space, we, the public, will learn how to walk strangely, stay strangely and think strangely, in order to become singular persons, face a world in which everyone is being flattened into “one,” instead of “every.”

Now the question for us is: where to go next? Can we live normally in the normal world? Or the world is a surreal world anyway?

Walking Strangely, Staying Strangely, can we reach the destination when the destination is nowhere to find?

The 7th Para-curatorial Symposium
South of the South: Rhetorics of Geography and Imageries of Delinking
2-6:30pm, Wednesday–Friday, December 19-21, 2018

Contributing Speakers: Hera Chan & Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, Junyuan Feng, Kun Huang, Li Yongning, Liu Ye, Adrián Melis, Kwesi Dzapong Prah, Françoise Vergès, Lyno Vuth, Zairong Xiang, Yang Yuanyuan, Zeng Han, Musquiqui Chihying

Curated by: Nikita Yingqian Cai

South of the South: Rhetorics of Geography and Imageries of Delinking, the 7th Para-curatorial symposium, recognizes the constitutive histories and indigenous culture of Canton and the constructed narratives of the Pearl River Delta as a situated point of departure. Setting off from the historical moment of Bandung Conference and its deliberate economic and political choices of delinking with imperial power and hegemonic system, lectures and screenings shed light on the legacy of solidarity among the third world countries and how the Souths relate to each other by confronting “The Promise of Development” in the neoliberal, post-Cold War period. While rhetorics of geography and transnational trajectories of postcolonial subjects have been assimilated by major US-European institutions in the past two decades, the symposium enacts the performative potential of story-telling by inviting artists and institutional practitioners to speculate on “What if Stories are Tools?” beyond the exhibition and institutional formats, and to recuperate the capacity of creating disparate vocabularies and disruptions on a vernacular level. The last part of the symposium is dedicated to the interrogation of “Where is the South Now?” by collectively imagining a coordinated site of resistance. Informed by the intertwined histories of various Souths, the spectral entanglement of imperial powers and the global nationalistic movements of “closing down”, perspectives of gender, culture and technology are introduced to hack into the dominant infrastructures of hierarchy, to invoke other ways of interrelation and worlding, and to transform the dualistic demarcation of north and south, west and east.