Zairong Xiang Read Bio Collapse
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), and the 14th Shanghai Biennial Cosmos Cinema (2023-2024), among many other projects. He is curating an exhibition at Para-Site Hong Kong titled How to be Happy Together? (Dec. 2024); and co-curating (with Denise Ryner) a research and exhibition project at ICA Philadephia (2026). Author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books), he is the editor of 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 can be accessed at www.xiangzairong.com
# 142
An AI image generator was given the prompt “salmon swimming in a river.” It produced several puzzling images of similar composition, each of which shows what is unquestionably salmon in a stream of water. However, none of the results matched the familiar image of a legendary piscine hero swimming full-bodied against the current. Instead, they all depicted a fraction of a salmon, a fillet of salmon, its pink flesh ready to be seared or made into sashimi. In AI’s defense, the algorithm did not interpret the prompt incorrectly. All the right elements are there: this is not a pig in a volcano. Yet it all appears wrong to human eyes.
New York reception for 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema
