How to be Happy Together?

Artists: Nadim Abbas, Luis Chan, Luke Ching, Chu Ming Silveira, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mimian Hsu, Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, Ocean Leung, Liao Jiaming, Pan Daijing, Beatrix Pang, Ren Hang, So Wing Po, Tang Kwong San & Yuen Nga Chi, Hong-Kai Wang, Xiyadie, Caio Yurgel, Zhou Xiaopeng & Tang Han, Bruno Zhu, and Payne Zhu

Curator: Zairong Xiang
Visual design: nonplace studio
Spatial design: Su Chang Design Research Office

Para Site is delighted to present How to be Happy Together?, curated by Zairong Xiang. Departing loosely from Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together (1997), the exhibition enacts a critique of dualism and the questions raised by the dual and its split—between intimate and antagonistic partners, between political entities, between “us” and “them,” and even between “I” and “me,” transcending the logic of “either/or” central to racial capitalism and colonial modernity. 

The primary setting for Wong Kar Wai’s queer Hong Kong cinema classic is Buenos Aires—the literal opposite side of the world from Hong Kong. Featuring over twenty artists from Hong Kong, its neighbouring localities, and Latin America, the exhibition alludes to Hong Kong’s clichéd status as a para-site “between east and west,” and “between tradition and modernity,” in order to interrogate encounters both imagined and real between two seemingly distant ends of the world. It engages with a wide range of artistic practices that stays formally within the pas de deux yet promiscuously opens up to an unexpected array of couplings and decouplings, spotlighting overlooked historical, social, and cultural connections between Greater China and the world to rethink possibilities of a queer happy-togetherness.  

The exhibition’s unique spatial design takes its cue from the Tai hexagram of I Ching, which is often used to represent the nine orifices of the human body. Central to the exhibition is the imagery of the orifice, and more broadly, the hole as a portal, which can function as a site for both concealment and revelation. For the first time since Para Site moved to its current location, all nine windows in the exhibition space will be unobstructed, allowing new pathways towards a queer cosmos of happy-togetherness to emerge. The exhibition invites the audience to ponder: How can we live at once with our differences, shared struggles, or even complicity with those we most resist? Can we still live together, happily?

About the curator
Zairong Xiang’s research, teaching, and curatorial practices engage with cosmology and cosmopolitanism in their culturally diverse, historically specific, and conceptually promiscuous manifestations in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl. He teaches literature and art at Duke Kunshan University, and was co-curator of the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial, “Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World)” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022), and the 14th Shanghai Biennial Cosmos Cinema (2023–2024). He is working on a research and exhibition project around Afro-Asian stand-in and solidarity. Author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018), he has also edited exhibition catalogues, journal special issues, and a film archive. He is currently completing his second book on “transdualism.” Through the concept of  “shanzhai/counterfeit,” he continues a multifaceted research into the artistic and intellectual exchanges in the Global South, especially between Latin America and China since the nineteenth century. Once a research fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University, he was twice the recipient of the EU Erasmus Mundus scholarship. All his writings and previous lectures could be accessed here.