Papers by Elaine W 何穎雅 Ho
Publishing as Method, 2023
Short essay from _Publishing as Method_, a book that explores art publishing today, in particular... more Short essay from _Publishing as Method_, a book that explores art publishing today, in particular, the practices of small-scale publishing in Asia. Focusing on “Asia” and “small-scale publishing,” it attempts to contextualize and read together the increasingly important publishing practices in contemporary art within historical and regional contexts.
_Publishing as Method_ is a research project on Asian small-scale publishing that mediabus, a publishing collective based in Seoul, has been conducting since 2020. It has been realized as an exhibition (October 30–December 20, 2020, Art Sonje Center), publication, and documentary film.
Šeleppūtu, 2020
Published August 2020 by Šeleppūtu, a transnational network of publishing practitioners that circ... more Published August 2020 by Šeleppūtu, a transnational network of publishing practitioners that circulates a newsletter. A previous version of this text was submitted for the second edition of the Black Book Assembly newsletter, published in January 2020 by 아나클랜 Anarclan (Seoul).
The Book of Failure, 2019
亞洲藝術文獻庫 Asia Art Archive （website）, 2018
Part of the "Shortlists" series from Asia Art Archive. Shortlists offer thematic selections from ... more Part of the "Shortlists" series from Asia Art Archive. Shortlists offer thematic selections from AAA’s Collection, including overviews and annotations by invited contributors. The following Shortlist by Display Distribute focuses on zine and independent publishing cultures in East and South East Asia, and departs from a Western-dominated narrative by locating alternative trajectories in the region, as developed through their practice-based perspective called the “Semi-Autonomous Zine.”
Technological Accidents, Accidental Technologies, 2023
How have technologies been coincidentally developed and anticipated in the arts? How does this re... more How have technologies been coincidentally developed and anticipated in the arts? How does this relate to the reintegration of art and everyday life? What are some of the issues and traps involved?
"Often, the accidental invention of technologies occur in art practices that are not technologically driven and primarily think of themselves as social and cultural experiments. In other words, communal-experimental inventions of everyday technologies, such as 'practices of everyday life' can be fully manual and offline technologies but also automated and operationalized any time. It may not be upscaling that is the most problematic, but rather hitherto unacknowledged issues, glossed-over conflicts, and hidden dark sides that, when amplified in this process, metastasize into catastrophes. [...] With the distinction between the concept of the accident from that of coincidence, we hope to reach an alternative imagination of the productive use of resources. [...] The real question is whether the artificially separated realm of the arts should not be taken out of the sandbox and reintegrated into everyday life and social practices. [...] If such divisions between art, technology, research, and society — where signals transmute into carriers and vice versa — were once again to become disputed, their relations need to be renegotiated."
___
Originally published in: Joke Brouwer and Sjoerd van Tuinen, Eds, _Technological Accidents, Accidental Technologies_ (Rotterdam:
V2_ Publishing, 2023) 60-80.
ISBN 978-90-828935-8-8
午夜太陽與貓頭鷹 Midnight Sun and the Owl — 2021亞洲藝術雙年展讀本 The Reader of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial , 2022
_Midnight Sun and the Owl_ is edited by Thanavi Chotpradit as a curatorial work for the 2021 Asia... more _Midnight Sun and the Owl_ is edited by Thanavi Chotpradit as a curatorial work for the 2021 Asian Art Biennial in non-exhibition format. As “Curator Editor”, she presents a collection of essays by writers in the Asian-Pacific region and beyond. It connects to the biennial through the theme Phantasmapolis or “spectral city” and keywords such as: futurism, futurist architecture, mega Asian cities, urbanization, dystopia, pandemic, political unrest, digitalization, implication of new technology, religion and indigenous folklore.
“A City of Memory Denied and Futures Unwritten” is a collaborative narration and reflection of an Asian chronopolitics through the lens of Hong Kong since 2019.
假如（在一起）can we live (together), 2014
The Endotic Reader, 2021
Feeling through the practice of domesticity as a manner of de-institutionalising in friendship an... more Feeling through the practice of domesticity as a manner of de-institutionalising in friendship and collaboration.
From _The Endotic Reader N.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings_, edited by Benjamin BUSCH & Lorenzo SANDOVAL
Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia, 2015
New attempts to define and expose uncharted territories have only time
and again found themselve... more New attempts to define and expose uncharted territories have only time
and again found themselves in blind service of hegemonic structures. The "natural" character of Chinese characteristics, and even its introduction into the contemporary lexicon, has been carefully handed down as a predetermined strategy and ideological principle based upon economic development. The fantastic rise of the Chinese art market parallel to such top-down molding in the last thirty years may be seen in certain senses as part of the success story, but the increasing complexity of socio-economic relations grounding contemporary artistic creation also appears to follow a path of the mappable, with keywords such as added-value, cultural district development and art superstars highlighting its legend. Underneath this map, however, is the enormous fissure between such top-down initiatives and another topology of grassroots intervention. Marked by ruptures in physical space and an ongoing play between autonomy and heteronomy, the perspective of a socalled "alternative arts practice" in China offers instead an image of the "unmappability " circumscribing a political, cultural, and economic flux. The following analysis seeks, therefore, to embrace the very contradiction that occurs with its production. Case studies of several artist-initiated practices will explore a politics and aesthetics in the making; that is to say, one which has yet to be, or one that defies the certainty of mapping and an art market categorization. What emerges therein is a politics of exception, whereby the complexities of Mainland sociopolitics cannot delineate a formula for artistic production but only be navigated as a realm of singularities, affects, and encounters. The particular circumstances which have led to the creation of spaces such as Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab (Wuhan), WooferTen (Hong Kong), Lijiang Studio (Lijiang), and HomeShop (Beijing) exemplify such spontaneous modes of artistic practice. Their genealogies are traced here to highlight a micropolitics embedded within and counter to the prevailing forces of a socialist market economy. It is from within these structures that a meta-analysis will look beyond these groups as a pegged phenomenon and rather as a series of narratives involving practices, engagements, and relations that undo a common thinking of resistance.
箭厂空间四年书 Arrow Factory: The Next Four Years, 2015
Institution for the Future, 2012
Viscose, 2021
Weaving personal histories, industrial history, and the story of a collective called 'The Most In... more Weaving personal histories, industrial history, and the story of a collective called 'The Most Invincible Female Troupe of the Cosmos' 【女子天團】
Publication Studio Portable: A Mobile Publishing Manual, 2019
_PUBLICATION STUDIO PORTABLE: A Mobile Publishing Manual_ is the result and documentation of the ... more _PUBLICATION STUDIO PORTABLE: A Mobile Publishing Manual_ is the result and documentation of the wider project PUBLICATION STUDIO PORTABLE, a collaboration between Publication Studio Rotterdam (NL) and Publication Studio Pearl River Delta (HK). "Getting Lighter, Still Labour-Intensive" details some of the ambivalence of the work-leisure complex behind fading production industries since Hong Kong's handover back to mainland China, as told via an interlaced interview with a retiring print master and his mahjong-playing friends.
ArtReview Asia, 2014
This experiment, entitled "Who Goes, Where Are?" kneads together a series of public dialogues tha... more This experiment, entitled "Who Goes, Where Are?" kneads together a series of public dialogues that address independent initiatives in the Chinese context and the reflexivity of one-to-one conversation via a performative play between language and gesture. Each encounter is reworked and recontextualised from the previous — from a joint academic paper to a performance to an audio collage — making the objects of artistic research indistinguishable from their processes and complicating our roles as independent researchers as well as practitioners. What follows is part four in the series, an annotated documentation of a documentation, taken from previous instances of our ongoing encounter.
香港農民曆 The HK FARMers' Almanac, 2015
This introduction to _The HK FARMers' Almanac_, an experimental publication inspired by both the ... more This introduction to _The HK FARMers' Almanac_, an experimental publication inspired by both the _Tung Shing_ almanac and _The Old Farmers' Almanac_, preludes a series of documents and ephemera from a year of urban farming collective HK Farm's 2015 residency at Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, including additional contributions from artists, writers and activists working in and around issues related to urban agriculture and DIY ecologies.
PUBLIC, 2009
"During its first project, "HomeShop Series Number One: Games '08", the spatio-temporal framework... more "During its first project, "HomeShop Series Number One: Games '08", the spatio-temporal framework of Beijing and the Olympic Games was revisioned as overlapping grids from which indeterminacies could appear, converge, and reappear anew. Each day of the Olympics marked an ironic countdown to the end of the HomeShop project, the passage of time marked by daily activities at varying scales of community engagement. [...] In particular, the project series reached peaks with larger events centred around the shop front screen, which had been hung precisely at the threshold between private home space and the street out front."
This post-deconstruction of the HomeShop initiative from the perspective of its screens brings into consideration a complex layering of scales, spaces, times and sociopolitical contexts from which to imagine the emerging conditions for an alternative engagement with public space and politics itself.
逆棲 Reverse Niche: Dialogue and Rebuilding at the City's Edge, 2013
Forward to the publication accompanying the 《Reverse Niche》 exhibition featuring the interactive,... more Forward to the publication accompanying the 《Reverse Niche》 exhibition featuring the interactive, communicative and dialogue-based practices of alternative art spaces in Hong Kong, Osaka and Taiwan.
Talks by Elaine W 何穎雅 Ho
八家 Bajia, 2018
For this section, Zandie [BROCKETT] and I designed and distributed a questionnaire to six selecte... more For this section, Zandie [BROCKETT] and I designed and distributed a questionnaire to six selected practitioners across Greater China. I see our act of questioning as a hidden form of description, which aims to facilitate another type of description: that being the answers of the practitioners. Their answers are increasingly precious, especially the description, reasoning and actualization of a (body of) work by the practitioners themselves.
[...]
What are the specificities of China’s current sociopolitical situation, and how have they impacted upon how art is discussed? I have four points to make. 1) We do not have the luxury to use the word ‘engaged.’ We
are disallowed to engage with basic political decisions, and our basic rights and tools for organizing solutions are gradually being revoked. Inevitably, nihilism grows and spreads everywhere. 2) Those who refuse to step into the perfume of nihilism still avoid all political discussion. As for the grassroots, they avoid it because they know they are ants; as for the elites, they avoid it because they fear they will be mocked by their peers, who denounce it as an intellectual performance. As a result, cynicism appears from top to bottom, as if rooted in thought and knowledge. 3) Cultural workers continuously suffer from the postcolonial conditions of language usage. They are forced to seek strength in nationalism, whilst befriending nihilism and cynicism. 4) Those that believe in, care about, and see the power of local community building, often lack experience in collaboration, not to mention the ability to find places for rehearsing being communal. It is not a simple question of individualism versus collectivism, but rather, it is the result of ailing governmentality. It is a crisis of taking a stand, as much as a crisis of the tools and tactics one needs to stand.
— 黄静远 Jingyuan Huang, guest Editor of “An Invitation to Describe”
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Papers by Elaine W 何穎雅 Ho
_Publishing as Method_ is a research project on Asian small-scale publishing that mediabus, a publishing collective based in Seoul, has been conducting since 2020. It has been realized as an exhibition (October 30–December 20, 2020, Art Sonje Center), publication, and documentary film.
"Often, the accidental invention of technologies occur in art practices that are not technologically driven and primarily think of themselves as social and cultural experiments. In other words, communal-experimental inventions of everyday technologies, such as 'practices of everyday life' can be fully manual and offline technologies but also automated and operationalized any time. It may not be upscaling that is the most problematic, but rather hitherto unacknowledged issues, glossed-over conflicts, and hidden dark sides that, when amplified in this process, metastasize into catastrophes. [...] With the distinction between the concept of the accident from that of coincidence, we hope to reach an alternative imagination of the productive use of resources. [...] The real question is whether the artificially separated realm of the arts should not be taken out of the sandbox and reintegrated into everyday life and social practices. [...] If such divisions between art, technology, research, and society — where signals transmute into carriers and vice versa — were once again to become disputed, their relations need to be renegotiated."
___
Originally published in: Joke Brouwer and Sjoerd van Tuinen, Eds, _Technological Accidents, Accidental Technologies_ (Rotterdam:
V2_ Publishing, 2023) 60-80.
ISBN 978-90-828935-8-8
“A City of Memory Denied and Futures Unwritten” is a collaborative narration and reflection of an Asian chronopolitics through the lens of Hong Kong since 2019.
From _The Endotic Reader N.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings_, edited by Benjamin BUSCH & Lorenzo SANDOVAL
and again found themselves in blind service of hegemonic structures. The "natural" character of Chinese characteristics, and even its introduction into the contemporary lexicon, has been carefully handed down as a predetermined strategy and ideological principle based upon economic development. The fantastic rise of the Chinese art market parallel to such top-down molding in the last thirty years may be seen in certain senses as part of the success story, but the increasing complexity of socio-economic relations grounding contemporary artistic creation also appears to follow a path of the mappable, with keywords such as added-value, cultural district development and art superstars highlighting its legend. Underneath this map, however, is the enormous fissure between such top-down initiatives and another topology of grassroots intervention. Marked by ruptures in physical space and an ongoing play between autonomy and heteronomy, the perspective of a socalled "alternative arts practice" in China offers instead an image of the "unmappability " circumscribing a political, cultural, and economic flux. The following analysis seeks, therefore, to embrace the very contradiction that occurs with its production. Case studies of several artist-initiated practices will explore a politics and aesthetics in the making; that is to say, one which has yet to be, or one that defies the certainty of mapping and an art market categorization. What emerges therein is a politics of exception, whereby the complexities of Mainland sociopolitics cannot delineate a formula for artistic production but only be navigated as a realm of singularities, affects, and encounters. The particular circumstances which have led to the creation of spaces such as Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab (Wuhan), WooferTen (Hong Kong), Lijiang Studio (Lijiang), and HomeShop (Beijing) exemplify such spontaneous modes of artistic practice. Their genealogies are traced here to highlight a micropolitics embedded within and counter to the prevailing forces of a socialist market economy. It is from within these structures that a meta-analysis will look beyond these groups as a pegged phenomenon and rather as a series of narratives involving practices, engagements, and relations that undo a common thinking of resistance.
This post-deconstruction of the HomeShop initiative from the perspective of its screens brings into consideration a complex layering of scales, spaces, times and sociopolitical contexts from which to imagine the emerging conditions for an alternative engagement with public space and politics itself.
Talks by Elaine W 何穎雅 Ho
[...]
What are the specificities of China’s current sociopolitical situation, and how have they impacted upon how art is discussed? I have four points to make. 1) We do not have the luxury to use the word ‘engaged.’ We
are disallowed to engage with basic political decisions, and our basic rights and tools for organizing solutions are gradually being revoked. Inevitably, nihilism grows and spreads everywhere. 2) Those who refuse to step into the perfume of nihilism still avoid all political discussion. As for the grassroots, they avoid it because they know they are ants; as for the elites, they avoid it because they fear they will be mocked by their peers, who denounce it as an intellectual performance. As a result, cynicism appears from top to bottom, as if rooted in thought and knowledge. 3) Cultural workers continuously suffer from the postcolonial conditions of language usage. They are forced to seek strength in nationalism, whilst befriending nihilism and cynicism. 4) Those that believe in, care about, and see the power of local community building, often lack experience in collaboration, not to mention the ability to find places for rehearsing being communal. It is not a simple question of individualism versus collectivism, but rather, it is the result of ailing governmentality. It is a crisis of taking a stand, as much as a crisis of the tools and tactics one needs to stand.
— 黄静远 Jingyuan Huang, guest Editor of “An Invitation to Describe”
_Publishing as Method_ is a research project on Asian small-scale publishing that mediabus, a publishing collective based in Seoul, has been conducting since 2020. It has been realized as an exhibition (October 30–December 20, 2020, Art Sonje Center), publication, and documentary film.
"Often, the accidental invention of technologies occur in art practices that are not technologically driven and primarily think of themselves as social and cultural experiments. In other words, communal-experimental inventions of everyday technologies, such as 'practices of everyday life' can be fully manual and offline technologies but also automated and operationalized any time. It may not be upscaling that is the most problematic, but rather hitherto unacknowledged issues, glossed-over conflicts, and hidden dark sides that, when amplified in this process, metastasize into catastrophes. [...] With the distinction between the concept of the accident from that of coincidence, we hope to reach an alternative imagination of the productive use of resources. [...] The real question is whether the artificially separated realm of the arts should not be taken out of the sandbox and reintegrated into everyday life and social practices. [...] If such divisions between art, technology, research, and society — where signals transmute into carriers and vice versa — were once again to become disputed, their relations need to be renegotiated."
___
Originally published in: Joke Brouwer and Sjoerd van Tuinen, Eds, _Technological Accidents, Accidental Technologies_ (Rotterdam:
V2_ Publishing, 2023) 60-80.
ISBN 978-90-828935-8-8
“A City of Memory Denied and Futures Unwritten” is a collaborative narration and reflection of an Asian chronopolitics through the lens of Hong Kong since 2019.
From _The Endotic Reader N.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings_, edited by Benjamin BUSCH & Lorenzo SANDOVAL
and again found themselves in blind service of hegemonic structures. The "natural" character of Chinese characteristics, and even its introduction into the contemporary lexicon, has been carefully handed down as a predetermined strategy and ideological principle based upon economic development. The fantastic rise of the Chinese art market parallel to such top-down molding in the last thirty years may be seen in certain senses as part of the success story, but the increasing complexity of socio-economic relations grounding contemporary artistic creation also appears to follow a path of the mappable, with keywords such as added-value, cultural district development and art superstars highlighting its legend. Underneath this map, however, is the enormous fissure between such top-down initiatives and another topology of grassroots intervention. Marked by ruptures in physical space and an ongoing play between autonomy and heteronomy, the perspective of a socalled "alternative arts practice" in China offers instead an image of the "unmappability " circumscribing a political, cultural, and economic flux. The following analysis seeks, therefore, to embrace the very contradiction that occurs with its production. Case studies of several artist-initiated practices will explore a politics and aesthetics in the making; that is to say, one which has yet to be, or one that defies the certainty of mapping and an art market categorization. What emerges therein is a politics of exception, whereby the complexities of Mainland sociopolitics cannot delineate a formula for artistic production but only be navigated as a realm of singularities, affects, and encounters. The particular circumstances which have led to the creation of spaces such as Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab (Wuhan), WooferTen (Hong Kong), Lijiang Studio (Lijiang), and HomeShop (Beijing) exemplify such spontaneous modes of artistic practice. Their genealogies are traced here to highlight a micropolitics embedded within and counter to the prevailing forces of a socialist market economy. It is from within these structures that a meta-analysis will look beyond these groups as a pegged phenomenon and rather as a series of narratives involving practices, engagements, and relations that undo a common thinking of resistance.
This post-deconstruction of the HomeShop initiative from the perspective of its screens brings into consideration a complex layering of scales, spaces, times and sociopolitical contexts from which to imagine the emerging conditions for an alternative engagement with public space and politics itself.
[...]
What are the specificities of China’s current sociopolitical situation, and how have they impacted upon how art is discussed? I have four points to make. 1) We do not have the luxury to use the word ‘engaged.’ We
are disallowed to engage with basic political decisions, and our basic rights and tools for organizing solutions are gradually being revoked. Inevitably, nihilism grows and spreads everywhere. 2) Those who refuse to step into the perfume of nihilism still avoid all political discussion. As for the grassroots, they avoid it because they know they are ants; as for the elites, they avoid it because they fear they will be mocked by their peers, who denounce it as an intellectual performance. As a result, cynicism appears from top to bottom, as if rooted in thought and knowledge. 3) Cultural workers continuously suffer from the postcolonial conditions of language usage. They are forced to seek strength in nationalism, whilst befriending nihilism and cynicism. 4) Those that believe in, care about, and see the power of local community building, often lack experience in collaboration, not to mention the ability to find places for rehearsing being communal. It is not a simple question of individualism versus collectivism, but rather, it is the result of ailing governmentality. It is a crisis of taking a stand, as much as a crisis of the tools and tactics one needs to stand.
— 黄静远 Jingyuan Huang, guest Editor of “An Invitation to Describe”
Mirroring the essence of the exchange within this practice, the structure of this publication is based on dialogue. The idea of peer-to-peer conversations was kindled during our initial encounters in the field, the understanding we gained about each other’s practices and the desire to eventually learn more from each other. The diversity and messiness of the fieldwork is part of the field, and here, that experience is expressed in the original voices of the practitioners.
This edited PDF includes conversations I have had with Susanna BOSCH, 李峻峰 LEE Chun Fung, Zikri RAHMAN and 杨两兴 YEOH Lian Heng.