Weaving the Possible of Impossible: Visual Riddles and Emotional Ruins

2022.05.21 Saturday 20:00

Location

Online

Artist: Shao Chun
Moderator: Yuan Fuca

Date: May 21,2022

Time: 20:00-21:00

Tencent Meeting Code: 904-433-596

The new normality now makes our once-conformist bodies start to crumble. In the upcoming 40-minutes performative lecture "Weaving the Possible of Impossible: Visual Riddles and Emotional Ruins" on May 21, Shao Chun will integrate photo collages as well as texts to reconstruct an online virtual space of Macalline Art Center’s Cloisters Apartment. The space will be transformed into a vehicle of fear and anger, paranoid despair and uncanny pleasure, and the various ravines, pores, folds, and uneven surfaces of the artworks in the “Riddle Bodies“ exhibition will become maternal bodies full of sensors, on which air particles are constantly brewing and weaving a wet web—like a riddle that is constantly enhancing itself.

“But in the end, behind these carefully arranged details, what I want to express is a kind of sadness, a sense of poetic despair. So that the audience is always in a field full of self-contradictory structures. Yes, for me, making visual riddles is an excuse for reflection and criticism. Maybe it is an entrance to a certain place.”

About the Artist

Shao Chun is a multimedia artist whose research interests encompass the field of multimedia installation, e-textiles, speculative design, and data-driven art. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Art in Hangzhou in China and graduated from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in the Performance Department. In 2019, she received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Washington at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Her most recent research focuses on interactive textiles, exploring the poetics between touch and emotion. From 2014 to 2018, Shao taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, along with numerous exhibitions, awards, and residencies.

About the Moderator

Yuan Fuca, Chief Curator-at-Large of Macalline Art Center. She was the founding Artistic Director of the Center between 2019 to 2022. Yuan Fuca has previously held positions at Independent Curator International in New York City, Spacetime C.C. (the New York studio of American sculptor Mark Di Suvero), and the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation. From 2016 to 2019, Yuan co-founded and managed Salt Projects, a non-profit art space that offered a site for practice and exchange among young artists and practitioners. Fuca’s curatorial practice has been supported by Parasite (Hong Kong), Maxim Gorki Theater, Asia Society, Japan Foundation and New Century Art Foundation. She is the founding editor of Heichi magazine, the online bilingual publishing platform affiliated with Macalline Art Center. Her writing has been published on platforms such as Artforum, Artnews, BOMB, Flash Art, and Frieze.

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.