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AAAinA was pleased to present a two-part series in May called Entangled Histories. In Part 1 of this series, independent curator Hammad Nasar made a presentation about the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends, followed by a conversation with curator Lesley Ma.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends (Nov. 18, 2023 – Feb. 18, 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge) tells the story of the extraordinary activity at the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Banks, Cumbria between 1972 and 1983. The LYC was the single-minded effort of the artist and polymath, Li Yuan-chia (1929-94), who moved to the rural north of England by way of London, Bologna, Taipei and Guangxi in China.
The exhibition and its accompanying publication aim to establish Li’s work at the LYC as a kind of world making, by connecting Li’s ink paintings to his cosmic conceptual art practice to his interest in participation and friendship as well as his engagement with nature and the landscape. Making New Worlds follows a distributed, collaborative and propositional way of exhibition making as a platform of reparative art history, and is the culmination of the multi-year London, Asia research project, co-led by Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (part of Yale University).
Making New Worlds is curated by Hammad Nasar, Sarah Victoria Turner and Amy Tobin.
Please click this link for more information on the exhibition.
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer, and strategic advisor. He has held research fellowships at Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre, London (where co-led the ‘London, Asia’ project) and UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute. Earlier, he was Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London; Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and, co-founded Green Cardamom, London.
Known for collaborative, exhibition-led inquiry, his recent exhibitions include: Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now (2023-24); Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends (2023-24); Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging (2023); British Art Show 9 (2021-22); Turner Prize (2021); Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition (2018-19) and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017).
He is a board member of the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) and Mophradat (Belgium), and was awarded an MBE for services to the arts in 2023.
Lesley Ma joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Spring 2022 as the inaugural Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator of Asian Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2013 to 2022, she was founding Curator, Ink Art at M+, Hong Kong, a museum for global visual culture that opened in 2021. Prior to M+, she curated projects at Para Site, Hong Kong and was Project Director at Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio in New York. Her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, focused on abstract painting in postwar Taiwan.
AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation.