M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, continues to deepen its commitment to performance art, aiming to address the historical context of this art form as well as to engage with contemporary practices in Hong Kong, Asia, and beyond. M+ today announces the launch of M+ Live Art, a new biannual series dedicated to performance art, which will feature both established and emerging practitioners. The exhibition Audience as Performer inaugurates the series with work by five Asian artists of different generations, whose practices focus on the human body and explore the role of the audience. Two of the selected artists present new work commissioned expressly for the exhibition. M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer will be held from 1 to 3 June 2018 at the Goethe-Institut, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

The five artists in M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer—wen yau and Isaac Chong Wai from Hong Kong, Tisna Sanjaya from Indonesia, River Lin from Taiwan, and Duan Yingmei from Germany and mainland China—explore the idea of directly engaging the viewer in the art-making process, shifting the audience’s role from passive witness to active participant. The exhibition invites the public to consider the position of the audience as agent and producer of artistic meaning for new and unexpected outcomes.

Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director of M+, emphasises the importance of the M+ Live Art series for M+’s mission as a global, multidisciplinary museum anchored in Hong Kong: “We are delighted to launch M+ Live Art with Audience as Performer, with the support of the Goethe-Institut, a fellow cultural organisation dedicated to promoting creative exchange. M+ Live Art by its very nature invites audiences to take an active role in the realisation of the artwork. This series will continue to strengthen the foundation of M+ as a space for new and diverse cultural experiences in the lead-up to the opening of the M+ building, our permanent home in the West Kowloon Cultural District.”

For Audience as Performer, wen yau and Isaac Chong Wai—two local artists of different generations—present newly commissioned works that explore questions of value and social order. wen yau focuses on a local context to examine the meaning of belonging to one’s land. Isaac Chong Wai addresses the history of protests around the world, considering how such actions can also be viewed as beautiful and gentle. Tisna Sanjaya, whose performances highlight issues of religious injustice and environmental destruction, explores traditional rituals and the quest for social tolerance by inviting audiences to traverse a sprawling installation with him. Notions of the ritual and the relationship between the body and time in site-specific social spaces also play an important role in performances by River Lin, who prompts audiences to contemplate ideas of public and private encounters through a series of prescribed actions and one-on-one exchanges. Duan Yingmei, who began her career as part of the pioneering Beijing East Village group in the 1990s, continues her exploration of human behaviours and social conventions by taking her audiences on a personal journey, offering intimate encounters and encouraging thoughtful perspectives.

Alice Teng, Associate Curator, Visual Art, M+, is the curator of Audience as Performer. She articulates the potential of M+ Live Art to develop new ways of relating to audiences through conversation and collaboration: “It’s a great pleasure to initiate a new series at M+ dedicated to exciting, ephemeral artistic practices. The series is meant to transform people’s ideas about performance within contemporary art making and consider how artists are using the body to respond to the world around them. As the first M+ Live Art exhibition, Audience as Performer aims to redefine the relationships between artists and audience and break conventional boundaries in hopes of creating new and unexpected experiences.”

M+’s focus on performance art began with Mobile M+: Live Art, multi-site exhibitions and site-specific performances spread across Hong Kong, held in 2015. M+ Live Art builds on this programme and offers audiences direct access to artists through live, immediate, and ephemeral performances. M+ Live Art will act as a catalyst to spark curiosity, expand thinking, and create dialogue with the Hong Kong public about performance as a mode of artistic expression. With the opening of the M+ building, live performances will be integrated into the galleries and other spaces, to foster ongoing conversations between the institution, artists, and audiences.

M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer is curated by Alice Teng, Associate Curator, Visual Art, M+; with Jessie Kwok, Curatorial Assistant, M+; and Angel Hui, Curatorial Intern, M+.

Remarks

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. The vision of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, as well as provide twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.

Annex

General Information

Exhibition details:
M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer
Dates: 1–3 June 2018
Venue: Goethe-Institut (14/F, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai)
Times: Friday, 7–10pm; Saturday, 12–5pm; Sunday, 12–5:30pm
Admission is free. For more information, please click here, or visit mplus.org.hk.

Additional programming:
‘Artists in Conversation: Performance and Social Change in Hong Kong’, an artist talk with wen yau and Isaac Chong Wai, Saturday 2 June, 5:30–7pm
‘Artist Workshop: Painting with Spice’, with Tisna Sanjaya, Sunday 3 June, 3–4pm
Admission is free, but space is limited. Please register in advance here.

Works

wen yau 
A Drop and Two Dots: Everything Must Go! (Homage to All Peaceful Revolutionaries)
Saturday 2 June, 2–3pm

Isaac Chong Wai
Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises
Saturday 2 June, 3:30–5pm
Sunday 3 June, 12–1pm

Tisna Sanjaya
99 Sajadah Merah
Friday 1 June, 7:30–9pm
Sunday 3 June, 4:30–5:30pm

Duan Yingmei
My Hong Kong Friends
Saturday 2 June, 12–1:30pm
Sunday 3 June, 1:30–2:30pm

River Lin
Cleansing Service
Friday 1 June, 7:30–10pm
Saturday 2 June, 12–5pm
Sunday 3 June, 12–5:30pm

For further information, please visit the website at: https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/whats-on/current-forthcoming/m-live-art-audience-as-performer/

Participating Artists

Isaac Chong Wai
(Hong Kong, born 1990, lives and works in Berlin and Hong Kong)
Isaac Chong Wai works across a range of media, including live performance, video, photography, and site-specific installation, and considers the interplay between the collective and the individual, the politics of time and space, and real and imagined futures. His works often engage with other performers, with whom Chong performs, to allow for further interrogation of notions of the social and unified body. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Art at Hong Kong Baptist University. His work was included in recent exhibitions at the Stiftung Brandenburger Tor and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2017; the Bauhaus-Museum, Weimar, and the Gwangju Media Art Festival in 2016; and the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in 2014. Chong was selected for the Burger Collection Artist Scholarship Program in 2016 and the Bauhaus Essentials awards in 2014 and 2015. His solo exhibition An Artistic Archive of Borders will be held at the Kunstraum München in 2018.

Duan Yingmei
(German, born China, 1969, lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany)
For the past eighteen years, Duan Yingmei has made the live presence of her body the core of her practice, exploring universal human instincts such as fear, desire, loneliness, and joy through gestures and social interactions. She employs elements of fantasy and storytelling in her performances to investigate and understand personal and everyday experiences.　Her use of sound, videos, and installations further develops situational experiments that examine conventional social behaviours, and her desire to make connections with others inspires works that include the audience in hopes that they will recognise parts of themselves through her performances. Duan began her artistic studies in painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, but soon joined the group of avant-garde artists of Beijing’s East Village, who gained renown for the extreme use of their bodies in the 1990s. She contributed to several iconic collective works, such as the seminal piece To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, considered to be one of the first collective performance art works in the history of Chinese contemporary art. In 2000, Duan left China to attend the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (the Braunschweig University of Art) and studied under the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović and the filmmaker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief, both of whom remain strong inspirations for her. Duan has participated in numerous international exhibitions and festivals, including Performance at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in 2015, the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, the Lilith Performance Studio in Sweden in 2011, the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and exhibitions curated by Marina Abramović at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2005.

River Lin
(Taiwanese, born 1984, lives and works in Paris)
River Lin is a performance and visual artist whose work includes choreography, one-on-one performances, and live installations. Using his body as his primary medium, Lin engages with his audience to investigate notions of intimacy, time, and everyday rituals. He constantly seeks new encounters with others to consider how the body initiates intentions and activates meaning in both private and public settings. Lin also draws inspiration from historical narratives in visual art, theatre, and dance to offer new interpretations and understandings. He received his Master of Arts in Performing Arts at the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2010 and has since performed at exhibitions and festivals, including the ArtTrend International Performance Art Festival in Tainan in 2017; the Taipei Biennial and the DanzInc Festival in Singapore, both in 2016; and Rapid Pulse in Chicago in 2015, to name a few. Lin recently co-founded and curated the Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM), a project that builds a network of dialogue, collaboration, and exchange between artists in Asia.

Tisna Sanjaya
(Indonesian, born 1958, lives and works in Bandung)
Tisna Sanjaya is a prominent artist from Indonesia whose body of work encompasses paintings, etchings, performances, installations, and public projects that reflect upon the local ecology of village communities. Strongly believing in using his art as a social practice, Sanjaya is committed to creating works that highlight the daily injustices affecting his country, especially the environmental destruction caused by large businesses and the government. Recently, he has initiated collective performances with people from various provinces in Indonesia to better connect his art to societal concerns. He graduated from the Institut Teknologi Bandung (the Bandung Institute of Technology) in 1986 and pursued his postgraduate studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in 1998. In 2011, he obtained a PhD from the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta. His works have been exhibited and performed locally and abroad, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2015; the 5th Gwangju Biennale in 2004; and the Indonesia Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. In addition to his own art practice, Sanjaya teaches at the Institut Teknologi Bandung and founded the local art space Imah Budaya Cigondewah. In 2014, he received the Anugerah Adhikarya Seni Rupa award from Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy.

wen yau
(Hong Kong, lives and works in Hong Kong)
wen yau is a cross-disciplinary artist and researcher who has focused her career in performance art, often confronting issues of cultural difference, authenticity, and social relationships in public settings. By intervening in the streets of Hong Kong, she directly confronts pressing concerns of the city with her body and voice, developing a unique artistic language drawn from her strong desire for social change and justice. Her internationally performed and exhibited works, including the Civil Left/Right series (2007–), the Homage to All Peaceful Revolutionaries series (2015–), and the co-initiated projects Talkover/Handover (2007) and Talkover/Handover 2.0 (2017), are deeply rooted in their local, immediate contexts. As a researcher and educator, wen yau conducted the pioneering project Hong Kong Performance Art Research from 2005 to 2006 and co-founded Woofer Ten, a local art space advocating social practice. wen yau received a Fulbright grant as a visiting scholar of Performance Studies at Northwestern University from 2015 to 2016 and recently completed her PhD thesis, ‘Performing Identity: Performative Practices in Postcolonial Hong Kong Art’, at the Academy of Visual Art at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Venue Partner

About the Goethe-Institut
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. We promote knowledge of the German language abroad and foster international cultural cooperation. We convey a comprehensive image of Germany by providing information about cultural, social, and political life in our nation. Our cultural and educational programmes encourage intercultural dialogue and enable cultural involvement. They strengthen the development of structures in civil society and foster worldwide mobility.

In China, we organise and support a broad spectrum of cultural events to present German culture abroad and facilitate the intercultural exchange between China and Germany.