Speaker: Nikita Yingqian Cai (Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Times Museum)

Moderator: Prof. Yongwoo Lee (Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, CUHK)

Description:

Over the past decade, as Chief Curator of Times Museum, Nikita Yingqian Cai has been focusing on curating a network of people, spaces, objects and ideas in the region of the Pearl River Delta-a frontier of contemporary art in China. Cai will present the research-based projects she initiated at Times Museum, and share her experiences in how artistic expressions and practices are translated, fabricated and contextualized in the curatorial process. She will also map a variety of human and non-human actors, such as labor, virus, river, port, island, plant etc., in the forming and relocating of a frontier-where the region transformed from an agricultural frontier to a frontier of “Reform and Open” in the 1990s, and subsequently redistributes its labor-intensive manufacturing resources and extracting capital to the southern of the world. By inserting artworks, artistic concepts and investigations into already existing conditions and setting up a friction between them, shadowed context repressed by the developmental mentality is activated and may subsequently change what we think it is all about. In this sense, the curatorial incubates imaginations to blur boundaries and categorizations, thus challenge their constraining powers.

Nikita Yingqian Cai is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Times Museum. She has curated exhibitions such as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016) , Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Guangdong Times Museum, 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Belin, 2019) , Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021) and One song is very much like another and the boat is always from afar (2021). She initiated the para-curatorial series in 2012 and launched “All the Way South” research network in 2016. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019.

This talk is organized by MA in Cultural Management Programme, CUHK.

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/mycuform/view.php?id=2731241

Enquiry: haoqianyu@cuhk.edu.hk