Curated by Nikita Yingqian Cai and Xiaoyu Weng
Participating Artists:
Chang Wen-Hsuan, Dachal Choi, Chitra Ganesh, Jane Jin Kaisen, Iris Kensmil, Sylbee Kim, Mai Ling, Laura Huertas Millán, Sara Modiano, Mai-Thu Perret, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arin Rungjang, Shen Xin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Wang Zhibo, Luka Yuanyuan Yang & Carlo Nasisse, Mia Yu
Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman is rooted in the conceptual reenactment of works and archives of the artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) and Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952). All three of them have inspired artists, writers, cultural practitioners, and intellectuals of different generations to imagine and produce their own world images. Departing from a fictitious encounter of the three protagonists in 1979, the exhibition tells stories of women who search for their artistic voices, and whose identities haunt them while empower them—regardless of their various cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Their travels take them along colonial memories before and after the Second World War and through chaos induced by the ideological camps of the Cold War. Conflicted histories and individual narratives were pushed into the background by the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, but re-emerge as contemporary paradoxes: East and West, North and South are spectral doubles of each other; democracy and totalitarianism become two sides of the same coin. Against this background, the exhibition is conceived as a conversation between “them” merging with “us”, as a polyphony of cross-border storytellers who juxtapose historical materials with fictional constructs and speculate beyond categorisations of gender and culture.