Summer Institute 2021

Summer Institute Public Lecture | The Habits of Habitat: A Conversation with Artists Pan Lu and Zheng Bo

Summer Institute 2021 - Unform, Unframe

Summer Institute Public Lecture | How live can it be?

Summer Institute Public Lecture | The Habits of Habitat: A Conversation with Artists Pan Lu and Zheng Bo

Date & Time

26 Mar 2021 7:30pm–9pm

Location

JC Cube

Price

Free of charge

General

Moderator: Yeewan Koon

Artist speaker: Pan Lu, Zheng Bo

The artists Pan Lu and Zheng Bo join moderator Yeewan Koon in a broad and wide-ranging discussion of how we co-exist or disrupt the habitat—or that which is a place where an organism makes as home, and in this instance, Hong Kong. Using “China trade” art as a reflection point, Koon speculates on historical trade art –including drawings, narrative, serialisations – as memories of habitualised behaviours to discuss contemporary social practices, cultural economy, strategies of survival and issues of excess. These are some of the potential directions of the conversation as we start of think of place as a habitat, and the habits that form a place. 

This public lecture will kick off Summer Institute 2021 Unform, Unframe, a two-week programme of tertiary student seminars and distinguished public lectures focused on students from Hong Kong and Asia. Apply now for a unique chance to work closely with some of the most important art theorists and thinkers, curators, artists, philosophers in the world.

Summer Institute Unform, Unframe invites 9 professors to explore different perceptions of time and space, ecology and technology, and action and activation, adopting alternative approaches in teaching and knowledge-making.

This public lecture will be conducted in English, with English to Cantonese simultaneous interpretation.

*Tai Kwun will adhere to the latest health and safety regulations and enforce social distancing measures.

Survival Manuals 1-3 (2015-19) by Zheng Bo

Drawing Life (2020-now) by Zheng Bo

Many Undulating Things Bo Wang and Pan Lu (2019)

Many Undulating Things Bo Wang and Pan Lu (2019)

Many Undulating Things Bo Wang and Pan Lu (2019)


Professors Bio

Yeewan Koon
Lu Pan
Zheng Bo

Yeewan Koon is associate professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong. She has published numerous works including Nara Yoshitomo (2020), A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art (2018) and A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in 19th Century Guangdong (2014). She is the recipient of several research awards including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Scholars, and visiting scholarships at Cambridge University and Columbia University. Koon also works in the contemporary art field as a critic and curator. In 2014, she was guest curator of It Begins with Metamorphosis: Xu Bing at the Asia Society, Hong Kong Centre, and was one of the selected curators for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. She is currently working on an international exhibition, So long, thanks again for the fish, showcasing five Hong Kong artists at the UNESCO site of Suomenlinna, Finland in June 2021.

Lu Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She was visiting scholar and visiting fellow at the Technical University of Berlin (2008 and 2009), the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2011-2012), researcher in residence at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and artist-in-residence at Z/KU Berlin (2016) and visiting scholar at Taipei National University of the Arts (2018). Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015) and her new book Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China is published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2021. 

Zheng Bo teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, where he leads the Wanwu Practice Group. Committed to multispecies vibrancy, he investigates the past and imagines the future from the perspectives of marginalized communities and marginalized plants. He creates weedy gardens, living slogans, and eco-queer films to cultivate ecological wisdom beyond the Anthropo-extinction-event. His works are in the collection of Power Station of Art in Shanghai, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Singapore Art Museum, and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His projects are included in Liverpool Biennial 2021, Yokohama Triennale 2020, Manifesta 12, the 11th Taipei Biennial, and the 11th Shanghai Biennial. His practice has received support from numerous art spaces in Asia and Europe, most recently ICA Shanghai, @KCUA in Kyoto, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, Villa Vassilieff in Paris, and TheCube Project Space in Taipei.