Framer Framed

26 May 2021
12:00 - 14:00

Online Roundtable: Resistant Bodies

The program Now water can flow or it can crash, my friend consists of a series of online/offline roundtable discussions, interactive workshops, screenings and lectures to explore notions of art, archive, and activism in the context of East Asia and beyond. After having kicked off with an online launch and a first roundtable discussing creative modes of resistance in Hong Kong over the past few years, we now continue with our May program. Second up: an online roundtable shedding light on women’s stories in the sites of resistance.

Online Roundtable

Date: May 26th, 12.00-14.00
Moderator: Mia You
Panelists: Jian Woo, Wong Ka Ying, Hou I-Ting

The event is FREE and will be live streamed via YouTube. The language is English.

All around the world, the sites of resistance are being genderised and represented in a way that continues this genderisation. Women’s experiences and their autonomy in these sites are often reduced by the patriarchal discourse and excluded from the mainstream historical narratives. This panel is organised upon the shared sense of urgency that exceeds national boundaries – the urgency to represent women’s subjectivity through telling and re-telling of stories.

For this participatory panel discussion, we invite artists and activists from different East-Asian locations to tell women’s stories in the sites of resistance. During the discussion, the panels will reflect on their personal and collective memories with protests as well as their attempt to recollect, preserve and transmit these memories through their artistic practices. By organising this cross-national conversation, we aim to highlight the importance of artistic practices in the cultural memory-making process and memory mobilisation for the progressive future.

Contributors

Mia You is author of the poetry collections I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her creative and critical writing also appears in Artforum, Bookforum, The Boston Review, The Hairpin, Jacket2, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Poetry magazine. She teaches in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute and the English Language and Culture program at the Universiteit Utrecht.

Jiann Woo is a play director, writer, actor, visual artist and activist based in Seoul, South Korea who believes in the power of narratives and movements of bodies. She formed an artists collective AntiMoominClub in 2020 and its performance arts revolve around revealing the senses of other’s world.

Hou I-Ting is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. By blending imagery and video with embroidery, Hou challenges the way we identify imagery in everyday life, while reconfiguring an otherwise prosaic visual experience. She is especially interested in the role of women in the workforce, she re-arranges and re-creates economic production modes in different social sites while exploring more potential methods beyond these modes.

Wong Ka Ying is an artist and writer based in Hong Kong. She received her BFA degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. A keen observer of the art community and society, Wong critically reflects on the various social, cultural, and gender issues today through using a wide range of media, from polaroid photography, collage, screen printing, painting, performance to social media platform.

Live Stream

Time: 12:00 – 14:00
Language: English
The live stream can be followed free of charge on the Framer Framed YouTube channel. Subscribe to get a notification. Comments and questions to panel members are welcome and can be posted in the ‘chat’. The recording will be kept available after the event.

Live stream link: https://youtu.be/vVOOukNh7BI

Background of the Series

How to live life in a time of intense insecurity? A pandemic time, with a climate crisis looming and with populism, systematic racism worldwide on the rise? What can we learn from art practices and recent social movements hailing from East Asia to imagine a more sustainable future from our own situated context? The title of this program, taken from Hong Kong American martial artist Bruce Lee’s philosophy, reminds us that resilience and care come from fluidity, flexibility, and tenacity. In a turbulent time, we need even more so friends close and afar to make alliances for a journey in building a better world.

Together with artists, collectives, activists, and scholars, this new series digs into the question: what role do cultural practitioners play in social movements in East Asia? How do they transgress nation-based boundaries and join the flows with others? How can we archive actions that are always in flux, and so often, on the verge of destruction, disappearance, and alteration by the ruling powers? What symbolic and material techniques do artists mobilise to address ethics of resilience? And how can such artistic practices be restored so that we can learn from them?

In the coming months, we invite you to explore the various forms and creative potentials of resistance, remembrance; of fluidity, porosity, non-oppositionality, and care. Through this program, we advocate for a better world where we attend to our interconnectedness, where we float freely yet at the same time hold each other firmly, like water—formless and shapeless, maybe, but also more resilient.

Credits

This series is a collaboration of Framer Framed and ASCA/University of Amsterdam.

Research Team: Emily Shin-Jie Lee, Jiyoung Kim, Yvette Lok Yee Wong, Zoénie Liwen Deng
Visual identity & Graphic Design: Simo Tse
Facilitator: Jeroen de Kloet

Agenda

Network

Mia You

Writer and researcher

Wong Ka Ying

Artist and writer

Jian Woo

Visual artist and playwright

Hou I-Ting

Artist and researcher