Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Rita Padawangi, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This seminar explores how Beijing’s contemporary artist-practitioners react against the seemingly unrelenting predetermination of their lives. Foregrounding the political significance of artistic practices, the seminar conceptualizes where artistic aspirations originate (roots) and traces how they are produced and travel (routes). It details how art surveys the city and provides a record for what the artist finds (often without passing judgment), thus producing what Rancière calls the “sensible fabric of a new world.” I then aim to suggest linkages between the ways in which artists, often in collaboration with facilitators, draw connections between the origins of artistic aspirations and practices of (material) urban change, in a process that not only exposes strategies of containment and cooptation but also helps build new capacities to act and create spaces of autonomy in which alternative futures can ripen.

The seminar outlines what is about to become a monograph book project. It is a work-in-progress, grounded in (still preliminary) field research in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone and Songzhuang Art Colony. This research is funded in part by a MOE grant for “Aspirations, Urban Governance, and the Remaking of Asian Cities” (PI: Tim Bunnell, NUS Geography).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Marolt is a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Southern California. He co-edited Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating, and Instrumentalizing the Online Carnival (Routledge, 2011) and Online China: Locating Society in Online Spaces (Routledge, forthcoming), and is currently writing a book on Cyber China: Making Space for Change. In his research and writing, Peter explores the frontiers of New Media-augmented urbanity and the political significance of artistic aspirations and practices.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg