MYTH MAKERS — SPECTROSYNTHESIS III

Art After Hours: Myth Makers—Performances by Bones Tan Jones and Joshua Serafin

MYTH MAKERS — SPECTROSYNTHESIS III

Family Day at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Myth Makers After Hours

Art After Hours: Myth Makers—Performances by Bones Tan Jones and Joshua Serafin

Tai Kwun Conversations: Spill the Tea and Werq! Truth & Performance in Hong Kong Drag Culture

Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III: Teacher's Morning & Teacher’s Workshop

Tai Kwun Conversations: Exhibition(ism) and Social Change

Date & Time

23 Mar 2023 18:30 – 20:30

Location

JC Cube and Laundry Steps

Price

Free of charge

General

Tai Kwun Contemporary and Sunpride Foundation present a captivating evening of performances by the artists Joshua Serafin and bones tan jones.  Through dance and solo opera, the artists connect personal and community histories with pre-colonial folklore, gender non-binary traditions, and queer ancient mythologies.

Using ritualistic dance to invoke the coming-to-life of the Goddess Void, Joshua Serafin sheds the normative ideals of gender and colonial history, engaging in a process of healing from generational trauma that enables the artist to locate their ancestral historical body, a fluid non-binary form.  Through this dance, the artist hopes to find a neutral form in which their existence would heal and liberate itself—from the pain of traumas, structures of heteronormative ideals in society, and binary structures implemented by its colonisers.

This is followed by a newly created operatic vocal soundscape by bones tan jones, who narrates a family tapestry in which Malaysian ancestry is interwoven with Celtic and Chinese creation myths.

Through the portals they open into fundamentally queer cosmological systems, these Myth Maker performances during the 2023 Art Basel Hong Kong week will test the limits of our current knowledge systems and imaginations, opening up space for re-readings and new vocabularies.

Register now 


Speakers Bio

bones tan jones
Joshua Serafin

bones tan jones is a Malaysian artist and musician who currently lives and works in London.

Their work embraces multiple genres, including pop music, sculpture, digital images, and video. Through their fusion of activism and art, an alternate dystopia, both strange and optimistic, emerges. By drawing on their personal background and experience, bones has created diverse, ecologically conscious works that reconnect, engage, and guide audiences towards thinking in more sustainable, ethical ways. Typically, women, race, queerness, and identity serve as their primary focus. An example is their music video Grandchildren, which narrates a story of LGBTQ+ people as the descendants of witches.

They have exhibited work in several places, including the Shanghai Biennale (2021), Athens Biennale (2021), and Underground Flower Offsite in London (2020).

Joshua Serafin is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines, they are currently based in Brussels. They are also a house artist of Viernulvier from season 2023-2027. 

They are a graduate of Philippine High School for the Arts where they majored in Theatre Arts. They studied at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts majoring in contemporary dance. Graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2019, and gained their Bachelors in Performance from KASK in 2021, and recently graduated from their Masters in Fine Arts in Visual Arts in KASK School of the Arts in 2022 with great distinction and their master’s work has won the award Horliet-Dapsens Prij 2022.

They have collaborated with multiple artists in Asia and Europe ranging from performance to visual arts such as Arco Renz, Eisa Jocson, Manuel Pelmus, Bruno Isacović, Ming Wong, Adrian Wong, Choy Ka Fai, Leeroy New, Korakrit Arunanondchai, TG Stan company, Damien Jalet, Kang Seung Lee, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and so forth. They have presented their work at different festivals such as Deltebre Dansa in Spain, Queer Zagreb in Croatia, Centre National de la Danse in Paris, Wing Platform Hong Kong, Bouge B Festival in deSingel, Meteor Festival in Bergen, Norway, Nightshift in Ostende, Taipei Performing Art Center, Theater Rotterdam, Dampfzentrale Tanz in Bern. They have premiered their first solo work titled “Miss” in Viernulvier and currently touring.

Their works deal with questions about identity, transmigration, queer politics and representation, states of being, and ways of inhabiting the body. They are currently developing a cosmology of works that create new forms of rituals, and embodiment, based on queer ecologies.
They are interested in the duality between the physical form and its representation manifested through the alter identity they created called “Void”.