Friday, Feb.3, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Artists, Protesters, Museum Administrators: Singapore and Hong Kong
Mechtild Widrich,
Professor of the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at School of Art Institute of Chicago
(photocredit: Sampson Wong)
How do the globally positioned art hubs of contemporary art engage native and visiting audiences? How do institutions like museums and universities negotiate the tension between national politics and global art and intellectual discourses? And how do artists engage in local struggles and broader circuits of publicity? I investigate these questions by comparing two art geographies, that of Singapore and Hong Kong, that have much in common culturally and economically (former colonies and vibrant trade centers) but also radically divergent political structures and art communities.
In Singapore, I focus particularly on the trio of the recently opened National Gallery Singapore, with its simultaneous claim to pan-ethnic national and regional coverage; the NTU Center for Contemporary Art at Gillman’s Barracks, which stakes a claim to cosmopolitan art discourse within an art-gallery and university setting; and the Freeport, a for-profit art storage concept originating in Switzerland. In the case of the NGS and the Gillman’s Barracks, the reuse of British colonial buildings adds to the complexity of the image of a post-ethnic city state; I accordingly pay attention also to critiques of this ideal in the work of Singapore and foreign artists.
In Hong Kong, the recent ascent of the art scene to global prominence (with, e.g., the opening of the Art Basel Hong Kong) has taken place at the same time as the tense transition to Mainland Chinese political sovereignty. This is important to the city’s most dynamic art institutions, notably the M+ museum in the Kowloon Culture District (already operating, the building to be opened in 2019). Indeed, the Umbrella Movement, an activist Hong-Kong based democratic student movement, introduced a conscious merging of art and activism to East Asia. Sampson Wong, urbanist, artist, and writer, and Wen Yau, cross-media artist, curator, writer were involved in the movement and in the production of activist props now being archived by Wong. These items are design pieces, memorabilia, and potent political props, as discussion around the potential incorporation of these items into collections, notably the M+, shows.
Friday, Feb.3, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhiyan Yang (zhiyan@uchicago.edu)
