Скачать или смотреть Xiaoyu Weng in conversation with Bo Wang | An Asian Ghost Story

Night 4, May 21st
The conversation between artist Bo Wang and curator Xiaoyu Weng will center on the artist’s recent film An Asian Ghost Story (2023), a cinematic and conceptually inventive work that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War era. In every wig, there resides a ghost from the imperial past. Narrated by one of such ghosts, the film sets in complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, and weaves a thread that runs through various historical moments.

Xiaoyu Weng is an award-winning curator and writer based in New York. Her practice focuses on the impact of globalization, identity, and the decolonization movement, as well as the intersection of art, science, and technology. Most recently, she was the Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. From 2015-2021, she was Associate Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2018 and 2019, Weng served as the curator of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg. The biennial was awarded the “Best Exhibition of the Year” by the Art Newspaper. Weng was the director and curator of Asia Programs at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco, 2010-15) and has continued to serve there as a program and collection advisor.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA, Garage Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, LUX & Open City Documentary Festival, Seoul Mediacity Biennale & DMZ Docs, and Sharjah Film Platform, among others. He is a recipient of major international awards, including New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, O.F.F. Prize at Sesc_Videobrasil, Best Doc Short at Sharjah Film Platform, etc. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at the ACC-Rijksakademie in 2017-2018, as well as at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam.

Summit Two, 2024
Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters

Reality is Chthonic in the sense that it is not entirely revealed in any relations. For a realist, the world is not only the world-for-us, reduced to human access, but rather there is always a surplus. Accordingly, Chthonic Realism is a term that attempts to take into account the existence of the world-in-itself, apart from any relation, and, certainly, the world-without-us, the world of Inhumans, as opposed to the world-for-us, a world merely reduced to human correlation.* The term Chthonic also brings to mind the word Cthulhu. In various cultural and mythological contexts, “chthonic” is often used to describe deities, spirits, or forces that are related to the underworld, or the afterlife. Summoned from a dimension outside of time and space beyond the limits of human understanding, Cthulhu – a tentacular Lovecraftian cosmic monster – has appeared in many different texts playing different roles from an otherworldly monster in horror novels to a metonymic figure for speculative and metaphysical in contemporary philosophy. This creature is an inhuman entity coming from the darkness of reality – somewhere beyond human finitude – that threatens our world and shakes the pillars of human understanding.Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters explores the concepts of horror, speculation, the unknown, and the future. How things of the past can teach humans to gain a better understanding of reality. What happens when contemporary artists summon the ghosts of antiquity or monsters beyond the boundaries of time and space? And how things of the past can beckon us through the obscurity of the unknowable and towards a multitude of Futures?