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V.O Curations, 56 Conduit Street, W1S 2YZ

In Conversation: Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Joe Namy & Xin Wang

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Still from ‘All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss', 2021-2022 Courtesy of the artist.

Free admission

To mark Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s solo exhibition ‘All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss’ at V.O Curations, the artist will be in conversation with artist and composer Joe Namy, as well as art historian and curator Xin Wang. Taking the exhibition as the starting point for discussion, they will explore the personal and historical narratives that form their practices, sonic connections to land and movement and role of fiction in the recording of history. The conversation will also focus on the artistic processes that involve close collaboration and exchange with other practitioners.

Chris Yuan, ‘All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss'
Developed during their four-month residency at V.O Curations, Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s first solo show in the UK will feature a new film, drawing, and a series of ceramic works. Through sung words, foregrounded ghosts, softness as empowerment, and imagined dialogues as corporeal connections, Yuan explores the tenderness and cruelty of migration, drawing from one’s relations to others, to faraway places, to past and future.

The film features footage shot on 16mm film camera, animation and archival materials. Structured as an intimate conversation between two individuals, it is divided into five chapters: Mother; A Love Story; The Tower; Unknown Land; Haunted Island. The dialogue between the two characters appears only on screen, as the film is led by a sonic narrative – a score composed for the work by British trumpeter Kevin G. Davy. The artist extends the visual language used in the film through ceramic sculptures and large-scale drawing that are composed of the film’s script and elements of animation. All the works explore the correlation of identity and sound in the history of migrations, from both personal and historical perspectives. All Trace Is Gone, No Clamour for a Kiss is co-commissioned by FLAMIN and V.O Curations; supported through FLAMIN Fellowship 2021-22 and V.O Curations Autumn 2021 Residency; additional production support from not/nowhere; supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan (b.1988, Wuhan) works with video, sound, poetry and performance to re-imagine our relationships to land, body and language across time and space. Through affective and investigative ways of finding and making, their work builds worlds for new relations between individual and collective, self and the other, near and far, to emerge.

Recent solo exhibitions, screenings and performances include: Wuhan Punk: Chris Zhongtian Yuan, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2021); Art Lovers Movie Club: Wuhan Punk, ArtReview (2021); 1815, K11, Wuhan (2020). Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions include: Follow the Feeling, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2022); Play and Loop IV, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2022); Today Art Museum, Beijing (2022); Videoex, Zurich (2021); The Dwelling Place of the Other in Me, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); Spring Time, Palm Trees, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2021); Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy, Somerset House, London (2021); The 5th Documentary Exhibition of Fine Art Triennial, Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2020); School of Athens, Venice Architecture Biennale Greek Pavilion, Venice (2018) among others. Chris is a recipient of the 2021-22 FLAMIN Fellowship, K11 Art 11 Prize, 2020 Aesthetica Art Prize and OCAT Institute Research-based Curatorial Project (co-curator).

Joe Namy is an American-born, London and Beirut-based artist who often works collaboratively across mediums. Projects often focus on the social constructs of music and organized sound, such as, the pageantry and politics of opera, the gender dynamics of bass, colors and tones of militarization, migration patterns of rhythms, and the complexities of translation in all this—from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance. Namy is currently the artist in residence for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, a resident DJ for Radio Alhara, and a PHD researcher at the Oxford Ruskin School of Art. Their work has recently shown at Tresor 31 Festival Berlin, FRONT Triennial Cleveland, Renaissance Society Chicago, and Portikus Frankfurt.

Xin Wang is an art historian and curator based in New York. Past curatorial projects include “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); “Lu Yang: Arcade,” Wallplay, New York (2014); “The BANK Show: Vive le Capital,” BANK, Shanghai (2015); “The BANK Show: Hito Steyerl,” BANK, Shanghai (2015); and “chin(A)frica: an interface,” Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2017). Her writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Artforum, Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, Wallpaper, and Leap. Currently pursuing a PhD in modern and contemporary art – focusing on Soviet hauntology in postmodernism – at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Wang also works as the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she produced a series of online lectures during the Covid-19 lockdowns (“Asian/American: A Ghost Story”, “Technology and Fantasy”, and “Eros”) as well as in-depth series on artists such as Salman Toor, Julie Mehretu, and Jennifer Packer. Wang is a Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art, and a 2021 Recipient of the Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Grant for her “chin(A)frica” project. Forthcoming are a book chapter for the inaugural publication of NYU Shanghai’s Center for AI and Culture, and the "Future Pavilion” – an art + tech biennial at Beijing's Today Art Museum in Fall 2022, themed "To Your Eternity".