Fluid Boundaries Symposium

Join us for an engaging and thought-provoking symposium that explores the intersection of art, gender, and sexuality. Co-presented by the Hong Kong Art School, RMIT University, and Eaton HK, this event brings together renowned artists, scholars, curators, and collectors in the field to foster a critical dialogue on Feminist art and queer art in Hong Kong and Greater China.

Fluid Boundaries Symposium: Creative Dialogues on Gender, Sexuality and Aesthetics

13:30-14:30

Panel 1: Gender, Aesthetics, Artistic Creativity and Contextual

Chair: Ms LAM Laam, Jaffa

Jaffa Lam Laam is a Hong Kong-based artist specializing in large-scale, site-specific and mixed-media works, often making use of recycled materials, such as crate wood, old furniture, abandoned metal and umbrella fabric. Her works often explore issues relating to local culture, history, society, and current affairs, some of the topics include art in public, the loss of craftsmanship in the city, and the regeneration of art making cycle. She projects views and thoughts of Hong Kong citizens through her non-narrative and dialogical installations.

A Lost Art Horizon: Expression Extreme and History Trauma in Women Body Art in China

Professor MAN Kit Wah, Eva

This study is inspired by Amelia Jones’s arguments for body art that focuses on its development in the late capitalist, postmodern and postcolonial world. Her conclusions are that body art practices are performative, enacting subjects in “passionate and convulsive” relationship, aiming at dislocating effects of social and private experiences. She argues that these practices, desirous and erotic in nature, participate in the subversion of formalism in art.  This presentation would want to locate the bodily expression art in the context of Contemporary China a few decades back via a case study and reflect on how the extreme body art has become a lost horizon that is now very seldom performed or recorded, and the meanings implied politically, socially and economically.

Presenter biography

Prof. Eva Kit Wah Man is currently Chair Professor of Humanities at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University and the Director of the Hong Kong Art School under the Hong Kong Art Center. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar and conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was named AMUW Endowed Woman Chair Professor of the 100th Anniversary of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2009. She is Kiriyama Professor of The Center for Asia and Pacific Studies at University of San Francisco in 2023. She contributes public services to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, M+ of Western Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee and other capacities.

Arts and Grassroots Women: Community-Based Intervention in Shanghai

Dr IP Tsz Ting, Penn

Through the photobook Lens in Bloom, this talk explores the cultural implications of community-based art interventions for grassroots women dwelling in the socialist Workers’ New Villages in Shanghai. Can art enable a sense of empowerment and configure agency for grassroots women? Focusing on a group of grassroots women who endured poverty, severe illness, and domestic violence, the talk will illustrate the ways community-based intervention can enable grassroots women to express their affective experiences and simultaneously allow researchers to elucidate the everyday hardships through the arts these women created.

Presenter biography

Dr Penn Tsz Ting Ip is Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences (A&SS) at Hong Kong Metropolitan University (HKMU). Before joining HKMU, she worked at the Department of Cultural Industry Management, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2019–2023). Since 2018, Ip has worked as the Shanghai Research Team Lead of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded partnership project “Urbanization, Gender and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb). Her research interests include gender and women’s studies, migration studies, urban cultural studies, and affect theory. Ip is the first author of The Ordinary Women: Qualitative Research on Workers’ New Villages in Shanghai (2021). Collaborated with professors and students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Ip is the director of the feminist research platform “HEResearch: Global Distinguished Scholar Lecture Series.”

URLs:
Lens in Bloom PDF file
Lens in Bloom event

14:30-14:45

Break and informal discussion

14:45-15:45

Panel 2: Contemporary Art and LGBTIQA+ Representation in Hong Kong

This panel discussion explores representations of queer and non-binary representations within Hong Kong contemporary art. In recent decades, several significant LGBTIQA+ social changes have occurred in Hong Kong, including the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1991), the standardisation of the age of consent for same sex and opposite sex relationships (2014), and the introduction of dependent visas for individuals who entered into same sex marriages or civil unions outside of Hong Kong (2018). There remains, however, no comprehensive legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexuality or gender identity. The panellists will consider the role that contemporary art can play in inspiring social change and social inclusion for LGBTQIA+ folk and how artworks might encourage important conversations around gender and sexuality.

Chair: Associate Professor Drew PETTIFER

A/Prof. Drew Pettifer is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at RMIT University. His research examines queer history, the archive, power, embodiment, social practice, and representation through creative practice. Using art as a vehicle to foreground critical queer histories which have been systematically under-represented or excluded from dominant archives, his recent research has specifically interrogated how embodied encounters with creative works enable new knowledges of histories to be shared.

Panellists:

Dr LEUNG Hok Bun, Isaac

Isaac Leung is a practicing artist, curator, and scholar in art and culture.

In 2003, Leung received an Honorary Fellowship in Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the last few decades, he initiated and participated in various projects including exhibitions, workshops, lectures, publications, online projects, and symposia. Some of these projects include ’40 Years of Video Art’ (Hong Kong, China, and Germany), ‘The 12th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition’ (Italy), ‘Time Test – International Video Art Research Exhibition’ (Beijing, China), ‘ISEA Festival’ (Hong Kong, China), ‘Both Sides Now’ (Hong Kong, China, UK, and various countries), ‘Loop Barcelona’ (Spain), ‘One World Exposition’ (Hong Kong, China), ‘China Remixed’ (USA), ‘Clockenflap’ (Hong Kong, China), and ‘Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative’ (Hong Kong, China). Leung is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Mr CHEN King Yuen, Joseph

Joseph Chen King Yuen is an art and cultural curator and artist based in Hong Kong, currently the Director of Culture at Eaton HK, a purpose-driven hospitality brand where he builds community for artists, changemakers and marginalised groups and creates social and creative initiatives to support local cultures and foster international exchanges. Prior to this he worked with Para Site and Videotage, two of the oldest non-profit art organisations in Hong Kong in curating and managing exhibitions, public, educational and archive projects. His curatorial and art practices deal with gender, sexuality, mythology, subculture, revolving around visual art, moving image, and performance. He is the co-founder of Virtue Village, an art initiative creating and curating art that connects humans to spirituality and intimacy, and navigates the planes of queer, fetish, and posthumanism. Virtue Village’s works has been shown in Tai Kwun Contemporary, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Fringe Club, Current Plans, Videotage, Current Plans, PHD Group, Parallel Space.