Cici Wu, Untitled, 2017
Image of work by Cici Wu

Talk


A Disappearing Act: Conversation with Howie Chen, Su Yu-Hsien, and Cici Wu

February 23, 2017
Triangle Arts Association

20 Jay St #317
Brooklyn, NY

A conversation with artists Su Yu-Hsien and Cici Wu, moderated by Howie Chen. The discussion focused on the two artists’ works currently on view at Triangle, touching upon a range of questions: What are the particular urgencies for Su and Wu to use the past as material, reference, and structure for new artistic production? How does reconstruction connect a specific history to the present in meaningful ways? How does this practice differ from earlier cinematic and conceptual manifestations around the turn of the millennium? What are the particular formalisms of this practice and how much does it rely on re-presentation and the weight of the original material?

This public program is part of A Disappearing Act (Feb 16 – Feb 27, 2017), an exhibition developed from archival research in an effort to reconstruct historical works that were either lost, fragmented, never realized, or inherently ephemeral.

Howie CHEN is a New York–based curator engaged in collaborative art production and research. His curatorial and institutional experience includes the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1. He is a founder of Dispatch, a NYC curatorial production office and JEQU, a research project to assess how sociological and cultural economic approaches to art world debates can augment artistic critique.  In 2003, with artist Mika Tajima, he formed New Humans, a moniker for collaborations with musicians, artists and designers that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has undertaken projects at SFMOMA and South London Gallery. Publications include IRL (Primary Information) and Transformers (Badlands Unlimited).

SU Yu-Hsien (b.1982, Tainan, Taiwan) works as an independent curator and artist, and in his work, often addresses the underrepresented in society, culture, and history, and the possibilities of empowerment through whimsy. Selected exhibitions include the Taipei Biennial 2016: Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future, the 54th Venice Biennial Taiwan Pavilion: The Heard and the Unheard – Soundscape Taiwan, among others. He graduated from the Department of Plastic Arts, National Tainan University of the Arts.

Cici WU (b.1989, Beijing, China) generally avoids the political and reaches for the universal. Interested in plurality and the complexity of belongings that she cannot forget, she is growing by the day at PRACTICE, the alternative art space she co-organizes with other artists. Having received her bachelor degree from School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong, and completed her MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, she recently participated in a show entitled Mosquitoes, Dusts and Thieves at 47 Canal, New York.

Facilitated by Asia Art Archive in America, in collaboration with Triangle Arts Association.

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The program is supported, in part, by Taipei Cultural Center in New York and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.