End with a Book!
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
7:00 – 8:00pm EST
Online via Zoom
Our sixth annual End with a Book! celebration was virtual for 2020! At 7:00pm on December 16th we gathered as a community to help support the AAA in A mission into 2021.
At this year’s shindig, we were thrilled to host performances by Uyghur filmmaker Mukaddas Mijit and Hong Kong-based artist Wong Kit Yi. Video documentation of their live performances available below.
We were also glad to share remarks from AAA in A friends, including Lee Mingwei, Iftikhar Dadi, and Jean Shin, among others. Revisit these testimonial videos and see their recommended book list here.
Donations $25 and over received a specially made dumpling recipe zine, designed for End with a Book! by artist Crys Yin.
Contributions of $50 or more were entered into an artist book raffle, featuring publications by Ayesha Sultana, Zheng Mahler, Prabhakar Pachpute, as well as anthology works consider the scallion and Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong.
And donors of $250 and up each had a chance to win a unique drawing, “study-Cell, Liquid Circuit, Portable,” by artist Tishan Hsu.
Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker and performer. She was born and raised in the Uyghur homeland, and moved to Paris in 2003. She obtained her MA at the University of Sorbonne on Sufi practice in the Uyghur Region, and was awarded her PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Paris Nanterre in 2015, researching the “Staging of Uyghur Music and Dance.” She has published several articles in edited volumes and peer reviewed journals including Cahier d’Ethnomusicologie. She has made four substantial documentaries and a series of short films on Uyghur culture. She taught Visual Anthropology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès while working on film projects about Uyghur culture and arts. From 2019, she is involved in a research program entitled “Towards an alternative model of heritage as sustainable development: Meshrep in Kazakhstan (SOAS)” and several creative projects in Paris and in New York.
Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Exploring biological answers to metaphysical questions, she deals with odd scientific findings and the dysfunctional relationship between what is considered science and pseudoscience. Wong also investigates the contractual relationship, working with such ideas as patron collaboration through the 99-year leases for her artworks. Her most recent works have been included in projects organized by Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); TANK Museum (Shanghai, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019); Surplus Space (Wuhan, 2018); the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga, 2017). She received an MFA from Yale University, and has been teaching university courses about performance, video art and new media. When she is not teaching, she loves lecturing people in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. She is the co-chair of LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Hong Kong, and a die-hard member of KFC (kombucha fan club).
Video 1: Road: Three Poems by Tahir Hazmut Izgil, Performed by Mukaddas Mijit, Translated by Joshua L Freedman, 2020.
Video 2: Wong Kit Yi, Yes-Jet-lag, Performance, 2020.
Image 3: Ms. Qu’s Special Dumpling Recipes zine designed by Crys Yin for Asia Art Archive in America.
Image 4: Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong, Psychedelics and Technics by Zheng Mahler, Form Studies by Ayesha Sultana, Consider the Scallion: a Scallion Anthology, and Now They Wander Together by Prabhakar Pachpute. Courtesy of the artists, generously donated by Small Tune Press, Experimenter Gallery, Celine Wong Katzman and Diane Zhou.
Image 5: Tishan Hsu, “study-Cell, Liquid Circuit, Portable”, 1986, color pencil on paper, 9″ x 12″. Unique. Generously donated by the artist, courtesy Empty Gallery.
