IN order to raise awareness and provide knowledge regarding critical theory and art trends in contemporary art in Asia and the World, as well as create a networking platform for local artists and writers to exchange with the international experts and their peers, Zero Station is presenting an Artwriting Workshop and a series of Public Talks.
This program is part of the Asian In/VISIBLE Station (AIS) project, funded by the Japan Foundation – Asia Center and is curated by Zero Station.
see the info of the project Here
WORKSHOP
The 10-day Artwriting Workshop features a series of seminars, practical sessions and tutorials, aimed at developing art writers from Vietnam. The programme will take place at Zero Station, no. 12, road 43, Lam Van Ben Binh Thuan ward, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City.
Participants of the workshop, selected through direct nominations from across the country, are young intellectuals who have been actively involved in the local art scene. They are curators, coordinators, writers, directors of art spaces… All of them are fluent in both speaking and writing in English.
The overarching theme of the Workshop is “Translation: Understanding Difference and Distance in Contemporary Art across Asia”. We are using the term “Translation” more as a metaphor than in reference to the practices of translating different languages into each other. We are interested in exploring how artistic practice itself is a form of translation: a means of connecting and trying to understand the many geographic and cultural differences and distances that we find in contemporary societies around the regions.
The Workshop is being facilitated by a curator and an art critic. Decades ago, one would expect an artwriting workshop to be conducted by an art critic. But today, contemporary arts discourse is as much led by curatorial practice as it is by art history and theory. It is therefore fitting to have these two perspectives guiding our Workshop.
STRUCTURE
– The workshop will be conducted entirely in English.
– The Workshop starts on April 18th till April 21st, off on April 22nd, and resumes on April 23rd till April 27th.
– The Workshop convennes every day at lunch (except on
April 22). The mornings are free for the Participants to do reading, writing and preparation for the Workshop. Workshop activities commence in the afternoon after lunch. In the evenings, there is a programme of Public Talks.
– Aside from the selected participants, a number of observers were also chosen and given an oppoturnity to attend 2 seminars from the facilitators and all the public talks.
– ZeroStation will organize eat-in meals throughout the day for everyone who attends the workshop on site.
FACILITATORS
Lee Weng Choy
Art critic, curator
Lee Weng Choy is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics. He was formerly Artistic Co-Director of The Substation, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. Lee has convened and participated in numerous conferences, and done project work with several arts organisations, including the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and National Gallery Singapore. His essays, which discuss contemporary art and culture, Southeast Asia and Singapore, have appeared in such publications as: Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (Cornell); Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT); and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Blackwell). He is currently working on a collection of his essays on artists, to be titled, The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places.
Hiroyuki Hattori
Cuartor
Hiroyuki Hattori is an independent curator. Born in Aichi, Japan, in 1978. Hiroyuki completed his postgraduate studies in architecture in 2006 before becoming a curator. He has worked for renowned artist-in-residence institutions such as Akiyoshidai International Art Village and Aomori Contemporary Art Centre [ACAC] for over 10 years. He then shifted to work as an independent curator from 2016 and has been actively working across Asia. His research interests include exploring the idea of public space through process-based projects. Recent curatorial projects include: “MEDIA/ART KITCHEN” (National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta / MAP KL, Kuala Lumpur / Ayala Museum, 98B Collaboratory, Green Papaya Art Projects, etc., Manila / Bangkok Art and Culture Centre [BACC], Bangkok / Aomori Contemporary Art Centre [ACAC], Aomori, 2013–2014); Aichi Triennale 2016 “Homo Faber: A Rainbow Caravan” (Aichi prefectural museum of art, Nagoya city, Okazaki city and Toyohashi city, 2016); and “ESCAPE from the SEA” (National Visual Art Gallery and Art Printing Works Sdn Bdh, Kuala Lumpur, 2017).
PARTICIPANTS
Nguyễn Quốc Thành
Co-founder of Nha San Collective
Founder of Queer Forever! festival
Đỗ Tường Linh
Curator, Director of Six Space
Trần Duy Hưng
Co-founder of The Onion Cellar
Project manager at Quynh Gallery
Trâm Đỗ
Gallery corrdinator
Nguyễn Hoàng Thiên Ngân
Freelance writer & translator
Khương Lê
Programmer/presente at Saturday Cafe
Founder of Vanity vietnam
Dương Mạnh Hùng
Program coordinator at Salon Saigon
Nguyễn Thị Minh
Ho Chi Minh City University of Pedagogy
Nguyễn Bích Trà
San Art’s manager
Trương Quế Chi
Curator at Nha San Collective
SERIES OF PUBLIC TALKS
The series of Public Talks will showcase speakers representing a range of diverse arts spaces and initiatives from around Southeast Asia and Vietnam, with an aim to further networking opportunities and the development of arts discourse for arts professionals in Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam.
This series of talks is expected to benefit both the workshop participants as well as our local public and art community as it will revolve around some of the themes that we will explore in the workshop including these following suggested questions:
1) The AIS Project has an emphasis on working with mostly younger or emerging arts professionals. What is your own experience of inter-generational dynamics in the arts? How do you think one generation translates for the other, and how should we address these dynamics?
2) In the region, the last twenty years of cultural exchange — or cultural translation — has produced all kinds of exhibitions, residencies, publications, archives, collaborations with communities and so on. These conventional activities are still worth pursuing, but today many arts and cultural workers are searching for new ideas about how we gather together and interact — whether in local, regional or international contexts. What is your own experience with cultural exchange? How were the expectations of these gatherings communicated to participants? And how does one sustain the conversations that have taken place during the event after it concludes and participants go their separate ways?
3) Contemporary art and “digital culture” are characterised by plurality and fragmentation. Yet one of art’s big assumptions is that you can curate art from everywhere and exhibit it all within a single framework, like a biennale. No matter how unconventional, new art is ultimately read in the context of art history. This continuity makes it meaningful to speak of art as a specific category of cultural activity, even when one can’t draw clear boundaries around the field. Digital culture is even more plural and fragmented than art, yet it doesn’t describe a specific category so much as a universe of disparate phenomena. There is no equivalent of a biennale for digital culture, a single platform that can represent the scattered expanse of all things encoded into ones and zeros (from mobile phone multimedia to movies, music, video games, blogs and websites that cover everything from food to fashion to philosophy). If art is, deep down, discursive and reading-based, then digital culture is essentially participatory — something that we engage in. Digital content may dominate our attentions, but it’s not only the overlords of capitalism who are churning out this material. It’s us users who produce and curate a considerable share of the images, sounds and texts that fill up our drives, cloud servers and networks, which we sometimes broadcast for all to see. The digital revolution is changing how we read and write about contemporary art. How are you coming to terms with the cultural transformations of digital culture?
FORMAT
– The talks will be in English with Vietnamese translation – and held at Zero Station in every evening from 18 to 26 of April
– Each Public Talks session will involve at least 2 speakers
(on some evenings there may be 3). Each talk will last around 20–25 minutes followed by a 30-40 minute of an Q&A session in the end of the talks.
– This series of talks will be open to public and will be announced on our facebook page and Zero Station’s website.
GUESTS
Koh Nguang How
Researcher. Curator
Koh Nguang How was born in 1963, Singapore, is an artist associated with art collective The Artists Village and independent researcher on Singapore art. He worked as a curatorial assistant at the Singapore National Museum Art Gallery from 1985-1991. He artistic practice encompasses photography, collage, installation, performance art, archiving and curating. He started exhibiting art archives as early as 1992 in “Performance Week” at Gallery 21, Singapore. He created “The Singapore Art Archive Project” in 2005 and subsequently exhibiting the project in parts and as a whole in several events including 3rd Singapore Biennale, inaugural Singapore NTU CCA Residencies and opening of Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, S. Korea.
98 COLLABoratory
represented by curator Marika B. Constantino
98B COLLABoratory is an artist-run initiative and space in Manila, Philippines. We are a community + network + library + kitchen + shop. The idea is to have a setting where artists and creative individuals from other disciplines can interact and work together while presenting art, design and creativity in different ways; be it a talk, a bazaar, a publication, a meal or a simple gathering. It is a multi-disciplinary art laboratory that seeks to establish a convergence with artists, designers, curators, writers, musicians, film makers, activists, educators, researchers, cultural workers, performers, architects and students together with the general public.
http://www.98-b.org/
Gong Jow Jiun
Ph.D. Associate Professor, curator
Gong Jow Jiun was born 1966 in Chayi, Taiwan. In 1998, Gong graduated from the Department of Philosophy of the National Taiwan University with his dissertation Dialectics between Body and Imagination: Nietzsche, Husserl, Merleau Ponty. After teaching positions at several universities in Taiwan, in 2007, he was appointed as a associate professor and director of the doctoral program in art creation and theory at the Tainan University of the Arts. From 2009, he also organized the quarterly art magazine Art Critique in Taiwan (ACT), as chief editor and chairman and established it as a public journal. One year later, in 2010, the ACT won the Prize of National Publication as Outstanding Cultural Magazine.
Gong is also acclaimed as Chinese translator of writings by Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merlau-Ponty and Carl Gustav Jung into Chinese.
Besides his research, Gong has been involving in curatorial activities. In 2013, he curated the exhibition ‘Are We Working too Much?’ at the Eslite Gallery, Taipei. Related to the exhibition, he published two books, Are We Working too Much? I: Workbook, Are We Working too Much? II: Field Narratives. His recent curatorial practice was the show called “The return of the Ghosts” in 2015 and published two books in the same title, for which he is the co-curator (with Nobuo Takamori) supported by Taipei Honga Museum. From 2016-2017, he is the chief curator of Mutual Companionship in Near Future: Soulangh International Contemporary Art Festival which have invited 38 international artists showing their works in Tainan city.
Takamori Nobuo
curator
Takamori Nobuo is a curator with half Taiwanese & Japanese background, who born in Taiwan and work in Taipei now. Takamori is also a PhD candidate of Taiwan’s National Chiao -Tung University and instructor of Taipei National University of Arts. Meanwhile, he is also an independent art writer, whose articles have been issued in several magazines or Medias in Taiwan and Asia. His curatorial work focus on making connections between Taiwan, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America. For achieve this ideology, Takamori established Outsiders Factory, a curatorial team in 2009. This group constituted by young curators work on making more connections and experimental collaboration with Southeast & South Asia.
The highlights of his curation works include: “Post-Actitud: El Artecontemporáneo de Jóvenes Artistas de Taiwan”, 2011 in Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, Mexico; “South Country, South of Country: Vietnamese & Taiwanese Artists Exchange Project”, 2012, which collaborated with Zero Station in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City and Howl Space in Taiwan’s Tainan; 2013’s “Unfamiliar Nostalgia” in Taiwan’s several locations and “Sommerreise” in Berlin’s GlogauAIR (art village). “The Lost Garden” (2014, Eslite Gallery, Taipei), Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition 2014 “The Return of Ghosts” (Hong Gah Museum, Taipei), “I Don’t Belong” (2015, Galleria H., Taipei) and “Wild Legend” (Ju Ming Museum, Jinshan, 2015). In 2013, Takamori also works as an editor of a special issue: interaction of contemporary art between Taiwan and Southeast Asia, for “Art Critique in Taiwan” (art magazine)
Southeast of Now (Journal)
Represented by Roger Nelson, Simon Soon, Lyno Vuth
SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia was established by a collective of scholars and curators with the aim of looking and listening closely to the discursive spaces of art in, from, and around the region we refer to as Southeast Asia, from an historical perspective. The journal presents a necessarily diverse range of perspectives not only on the contemporary and modern art of Southeast Asia, but indeed of the region itself: its borders, its identity, its efficacy, and its limitations as a geographical marker and a conceptual category. As such, the journal is defined by a commitment to the need for and importance of rigorous discussion, of the contemporary and modern art of the domain that lies south of China, east of India, and north of Australia.
http://southeastofnow.com
Post-museum
Represented by Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo
Post-Museum is an independent cultural and social space in Singapore which aims to encourage and support a thinking and pro-active community. It is an open platform for examining contemporary life, promoting the arts and connecting people.
A ground-up project initiated by Singaporean curatorial team p-10, Post-Museum aims to respond to its location and community as well as serve as a hub for local and international cultures.
From September 2007 until August 2011, Post-Museum was located in two 1920s shop-houses in Little India, an exciting and truly historical and multi-cultural area in Singapore. The premises along Rowell Rd included Food #03 (deli-bar), Show Room (exhibition cum performance space), Back Room (multi-purpose space), artists studios and offices. We functioned as a rental venue as well as organised and hosted various events and activities. These included local and international Exhibitions, Residency Programmes for local and international talents, Talks by local and international talents, Workshops and Classes, Community Projects, Research, Publishing etc.
Post-Museum is a social enterprise which obtains additional funding from individuals, private companies and public funds. Currently nomadic, we will continue to organise and host various events and activities in different spaces.
https://postmuseum.wordpress.com/
T.I.G.A (Tindakan Gerak Asuh) [Malaysia]
Represented by Aisyah Baharuddin
T.I.G.A (Tindakan Gerak Asuh) is a dynamic and non-profit art group consisting of three core members who are actively involving, participating and organizing arts activities. The group has recently been running a space called ‘Pusat Sekitar Seni’ (2013), a creative space for community.
Pusat Sekitar Seni establishes as a space that supports critical thinking and creativity in raising the awareness on their local village issues focusing on nature and humanity. PSS has been consistently work closely with the youth in creative projects that involve them directly working with artist, social activists, multimedia artists, musicians, and gardeners.
This space was created to encourage interaction and collaboration experimentation with various backgrounds using creative medium to raise local community issues based on their own contexts. Through this exploration and collaboration, it has greater potential to support the arts and culture activities effectively and make art as their medium of expression, raise awareness, advocating issues and find solutions using creative ways.
www.facebook.com/pusatsekitarseni/
Isabela Herig
Researcher
Isabela Herig is an independent researcher based in London. Having worked as a photographer and a designer, she is currently enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University London, and will soon be graduating with a BA in History of Art with a focus on Southeast Asia. Her research interests include contemporary women artists in Indonesia and digital strategies in curatorship and communication.
Nguyễn Thu Giang
Ph.D on Media studies. Lecturer at Vietnam National University
Nguyen Thu Giang is a lecturer in media studies at the Vietnam National University. She has recently completed her doctorate at the University of Queensland under the Australia Awards Scholarships. Her thesis investigates the relationship between Vietnamese popular television and the remaking of nationhood in post-Reform Vietnam. In 2015, Giang was the winner of the John McCullough Memorial Prize at the University of Queensland for best graduate writing. Giang has published her work on nostalgia and television drama in Media International Australia, a highly respected media studies journal. She also contributed a book chapter on the rise of commercial nationalism in Vietnam in a Palgrave MacMillan collection. She is now completing her book with Routledge based on her thesis. The book is to be published in 2018 and is entitled Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market.
Giang has a keen interest in engaging with Vietnamese media beyond the stereotype of socialist censorship. Currently, she is working on a project about the relationship between social media and the affective economy of fear in Vietnam through the case study of the food and environment panic. She also investigates the politics of memory manifested in Vietnamese popular television. Giang is highly committed to public education in Vietnam. She is teaching various courses on media theories for junior students at the Vietnam National University, a task she enjoys enormously. She also published many journal articles and book chapters in the Vietnamese language to introduce cultural studies to local readers.
Art For You
represented by curator Bill Nguyễn
A Manzi and Work Room Four Production.
A Place to buy affordable ART.
A collection of sketches, photographs, illustrations, paintings – works, ideas, mediums & meanings, questions and responses by some of the finest creative talents working in Hanoi today.
A way to support your local artists (they deserve it) and keep creativity kicking.
A place to discover something new, beautiful and engaging… then give it a home.
www.facebook.com/artforyouvietnam/
Sao La
represented by curator Tố Lan
Sao La is a non-profit and independent art project/collective based in Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City, focusing on relationship among artists, community and art itself.
As the nature of a “space traveler”, not based on a fixed location, Sao La carries two main objectives: making contemporary art accessible to the general Vietnamese public through educational programs, and nurturing Vietnam’s growing creative community. The project will serve not only as a project that organizes exhibitions, film and video screenings, workshops and lectures but also as an informal place for Vietnamese artists to experiment, challenge and develop their creative practices.
Found only in the Annamite mountain range of Vietnam and Laos, Sao La is the name of one of the world’s rarest mammals. The word ‘sao’ on its own can signify ‘star’ or pose the questions ‘how?’ ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ ‘La’ suggests a shriek, call or shout.
http://saolacollective.weebly.com/
The Onion Cellar
represented by curator Trần Duy Hưng
Five years on since its creation, this collective run by a handful of Vietnamese citizens has made a name for itself as one of the most eccentric, adventurous and downright different players in this country’s arts-and-culture scene. Vietnam’s worst-kept secret.
Aimed to contribute to the development of alternative and left-field music, film and other arts in Vietnam, The Onion Cellar has been bringing together internationally renowned sonic artists and the best of Vietnam’s own talents for unforgettable concerts spanning a bizarrely eclectic mix of musical disciplines.
At other times, they amaze local cinephiles with official Vietnam premieres of genre-defying treats, treading a fine line, and exploring the intricate relationship, between sounds and visions.
Possessing an alarming abundance of open-mindedness as well as a partiality for pure fun and inclusivity, The Onion Cellar has been – will soon be – collaborating with fellow travelers across scenes and tribes, both Vietnam-based and elsewhere.
www.facebook.com/theonioncellar
Nha San Collective
reoresented by Nguyễn Quốc Thành & Trương Quế Chi
An independent art space in Hanoi, originated from Nha San Studio, the longest running non-profit experimental art space in Vietnam. Since the establishment in 2013, Nhà Sàn Collective has organized a series of mobile and guerrilla projects in public spaces as well as large scale projects with international institutes in Vietnam and abroad. Dedicated to examining local and global socio-political contexts and history, we support each other in pushing the boundaries of expression in Vietnam, with or without a physical space.
Their mission is to build a stable structure for contemporary art to grow in Vietnam. Through exhibitions, projects, education and exchange, we cultivate, support and challenge artists, creating room for new forms of expression and dialogue to thrive in Vietnam.
XEM Vietnam
represented by photographer Quang Lâm
A collective made up of 5 members, most of them are practicing artists: Phan Quang, Tran Nguyen Uu Dam, Hoang Duong Cam, Nguyen Truc, Quang Lam. Their unique way of operate is functioning entirely as an art space but in print material.
www.facebook.com/xem.vietnam
