Off-Site Talk: Zishi Han & Wei Yang at Asia Art Archive in America
Fri, Feb 21, 2025, 6:30–7:30pm
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Off-site program at Asia Art Archive in America in conjunction with In Practice: Zishi Han & Wei Yang
In advance of their forthcoming performances at SculptureCenter (presented through SculptureCenter’s In Practice open call), join Frankfurt-based artists Zishi Han and Wei Yang for a joint artist talk on their recent independent work and ongoing collaboration.
Opening March 13, 2025 at SculptureCenter, Han and Yang will present a new phase of their ongoing collaborative research project into historical Chinese homoerotic literature, intertwining multiple narratives that explore queer existences in China and of Chinese diaspora. Emerging from their shared interests in the power dynamics inherent in desire and intimacy, the artists’ point of departure is their own translation of the late Ming dynasty anthology of homoerotic stories 弁而釵 (Biàn ér chāi) by the pseudonymous "The Moon-Heart Master of the Drunken West Lake,” the title of which suggests the action of a man removing his ceremonial headgear and donning a woman's hairpin. Han and Yang’s performance-and-video works loosely interpret the text’s storylines to dwell amidst the blurry boundary between the fictional and the biographical, while drawing on a variety of Chinese historical and contemporary cultural practices, such as poetry, Chinese Opera, literati landscape painting, Danmei literature, C-pop and reality TV shows.
Zishi Han (b. Beijing, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) probes masochistic attachment to power structures through installation, sculpture, video and drawing. Drawn to forms that hold and let through, he constructs possessed and perverted apparatuses to dismantle previous relations and incubate unexplored desires.
Wei Yang (b. Liuzhou, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) explores human beings as a geographic subject in diasporic spaces. He layers collective memories to create hybrid images through myths, history and personal landscapes, which serve as sites of resistance against grand narratives and archival neglect.
Their ongoing project Hairpin Beneath has been exhibited at Perdu, Amsterdam (2025); Tropez, Berlin (2024); Memphis, Linz (2024); Pols, Valencia (2024); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2024); West Den Haag, The Hague (2024); Delfina Foundation, London (2023); and Pickle Bar, Berlin (2023).
Zishi Han and Wei Yang’s time in New York City is organized in partnership with Asia Art Archive in America (AAAinA). SculptureCenter and AAAinA are co-presenting public programming off-site in AAAinA’s Brooklyn Heights reading room that expands on the artists' In Practice commission and their ongoing collaboration.
Performances at SculptureCenter follow on March 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, and 22. Learn more about the performances here.
Asia Art Archive in America (AAAinA), founded in 2009, is an independently established and operated U.S. 501(c)3, and the first overseas hub of Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong. AAAinA’s mission is to collect, preserve, and make accessible information on contemporary art from and of Asia, in order to facilitate public understanding and specialized research to instigate dialogue and critical thinking, and to raise awareness of and support for the activities of AAA globally. To achieve this goal, AAAinA maintains a reading room in Brooklyn, New York which is open to the public free of charge, and comprises over 5,000 monographs, exhibition catalogs, reference books, periodicals, and audio-visual materials about contemporary art related to Asia. AAAinA also organizes a regular program of talks, screenings, workshops, participatory projects, exhibitions, residencies, and panels with artists, curators, critics, and scholars in the field.