Postscript of Silence

Curators: Iris Long, Sam Shiyi Qian
Assistant Curator: Zihan Chen

Artists: Vibeke Mascini & Ella Finer, Fei Yining, Julie Freeman, Liu Chuang, Nicole L’Huillier, Hsu Chia-Wei, Knowbotiq, Jeroen van Loon, Nicholas Mangan, Yuri Pattison, Diana Policarpo, Shubigi Rao, Riar Rizaldi, Susan Schuppli, Nastassja Simensky, Himali Singh Soin, Su Yu Hsin, Jol Thoms, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Richard Vijgen, Susanne M. Winterling, Cosmo Wong, Zhang Beichen

Exhibition design: Wang Yifan
Organizers: Ming Yuan Group, Ming Contemporary Art Museum
Producer: Li Songjian, Lin Feifei

Is silence the opposite side of being heard? The exhibition Postscript of Silence aims to explore aspects of the world that have not yet been coded into the human perceptual lexicon, thereby examining and questioning knowledge pertaining to environments that are increasingly being technologized and operationalized.

Understanding and interpreting matter, life, and geological time through “operational ontologies” and a mediatized approach—as both a response to the anthropocentric ecological crisis and as a thematic element—are present in much of contemporary artistic creation. As Donna Haraway suggests, a range of life-extending imaging technologies (such as ultrasounds, MRIs, and electron microscopes) are gradually placing the objects of our focus and nature itself in the position of the observed. This allows more observational detail to infiltrate previously unknown domains, rendering them readable, understandable, and exploitable, and integrating them into a worldview underpinned by scientific thought. In “Postscript of Silence,” this operationalization of natural knowledge involves not only a foundational infrastructure for probing, verifying, and processing data and signals but also implies a set of actions and management patterns driven by scientific or objective reasoning. The fascination with laws, models, and even predictions often overlook the fact that scientific perception is also a form of collective empiricism, and that the dynamics of knowledge categorized as “scientific” are flows of power rather than flows of truth.

Confronted with this situation, the exhibition takes silence as its metaphorical point of departure, aiming to carve out an interpretive method that does not center on the visual or scientific by utilizing a series of key terms centered around acoustics, listening, or the reachable environs and technologies of sound (such as muting, silencing, or inaudible entities). This leads us to focus on non-standardized operations, undecodable signals, and fugitive, elusive, uncaptured, or unidentified elements. Through the works or projects of 23 artists or artists groups, the exhibition allows the environments and natural entities that resist objectification and defy prediction and regulation to make their voices heard. In the gaps between sound emission and its capture or listening, the show implies a newly reopened cognitive pathway.