Presence That Fails to Manifest

It has been two weeks since I returned to Berlin from Hong Kong. So many things have come and gone. What I have actually seen—what has truly entered me—is something I always realize only after a delay. For now, I simply sit before my computer, trying to listen carefully to what inside me is speaking the loudest, what wants to be said first, what feels most urgent to take form in words. Today, I want to talk about shamans.

During my time in Hong Kong and China, I visited numerous temples dedicated to female deities—including, of course, the Seven Fairies. Among them, the one that stayed with me most vividly was To Yuen Tong Temple (桃源洞), located in Luk Tei Tong Village in Mui Wo on Lantau Island. Finding information about small temples in Hong Kong feels like treasure-hunting; even a half-forgotten blog post or an obscure Facebook entry becomes a valuable trace. Hong Kong is full of mysteries. Spatially, the city feels like it folds into itself four times over compared to Berlin, where I live. It is not merely that there are more people per square meter—the city also stacks vertically. Hills curl and twist; mountains lean right into the city. Stories have countless places to hide. Every morning, we literally descended the mountain—twenty minutes down from our hillside hotel to Central Station. No matter how long one lives there, it feels impossible to ever know the entirety of Hong Kong; you never quite know what hides where, or how.

Guanyin shrine that we encountered on the way to To Yuen Tong Temple

The spatial spectrum is astonishingly dramatic. People say that each district in Berlin has its own atmosphere, but Hong Kong laughs at that comparison. Each urban center feels entirely distinct; take a few steps away, and the city-nature landscape transforms completely; climb to the top of a mountain in the middle of the city, and suddenly a different universe opens. And yet, Hong Kong could just as easily be called the City of Arcades. The downtown is almost entirely composed of covered walkways; one can walk several bus stops’ distance without ever stepping outdoors. It is disorienting. Google Maps doesn’t work properly—it cannot comprehend verticality, cannot locate you precisely on its flat grid, because in Hong Kong, several worlds sit on top of one another within a single coordinate. The territory consists of more than 250 islands; how different each one must be.

The stories hidden in this ten-thousand-forms-of-life (千態萬象) space are as difficult to discover as they seem to wish to remain concealed. Almost no records survive. Ah… why am I always drawn to things like this? Why do I insist on finding them, only to mourn their disappearance? Why do I keep obsessing over intangible things—things that fade, things that slip away—people, places, stories that no longer exist? (Do disappearing things not have the right to disappear? Am I romanticizing them simply because they are gone—because it lets me say, “those were the days”?) No…that’s not it. It’s an instinctive attraction to what cannot be defined. If everything could be cleanly categorized, folded into language, and stored neatly in a drawer, I wouldn’t need to dig this deeply.

I came here to study goddesses and the female communities that served them—and once again, the destination became shamanism. Yet in the end, I met no shamans—only hearsay, fragments, second-hand stories. How different would things have been if I had focused on this from the start?

Lately, I’ve been listening often to Ocean Vuong’s talks. Strangely, his thoughts on death and life echo my own so closely that he has become one of my most intimate friends in recent days. In the podcast Tricycle Talks—in the episode titled “Buddhist Poet Ocean Vuong on Failure, Redemption, and Second Chances”—he speaks about Derrida, Mark Fisher’s hauntology, and the Eerie. He said,

“And he says something really, I felt really unique where he says, the eerie is presence that fails to manifest. And he talks about ruins behaving this way, or, you know, forest without tree, without leaves, right? so like there’s this gesture toward capacity, towards presence that fails.”

Then Ocean continues, “Isn’t this what Buddhism means by nothingness?” At that moment—dding—something clicked. I think here, “fail” does not mean failure. It feels more like a temporal condition where already and not yet coexist—a state in which ruins, stories, and beings are present but not yet fully manifested. Things that exist, but remain unseen. Anyway, returning to what I was saying—let’s talk about To Yuen Tong Temple, the origin point of all these questions.

Among the gods, there is something like popularity. Each region has its own most beloved deities—usually the mainstream ones: Guanyin (觀音), Guan Di (關帝), Mazu (媽祖), and others. Their temples are easy to find in any city center. The Seven Fairies, however, are not part of that mainstream—especially not in Hong Kong. Yet they are not entirely marginal either. At least before the 1970s, in Guangdong and Hong Kong, the Seven Fairies Festival was grand, common, even ordinary.

Now, at least in Hong Kong, you must leave the city to see them—to Tsuen Wan, about an hour away, or by ferry to Peng Chau or Lantau Island. There’s a sadness in that, that you can’t see them every day. But perhaps that is what makes them special—you have to make time, prepare, and go deliberately. Because of them, I got to travel; perhaps that was their real gift. During my three months in Hong Kong and China, I wandered all over under the pretext of “temple visits.”

A few people joined us on the trip to the Seven Fairies Temple on Lantau Island—excited like schoolchildren on a field trip. There were six of us in total, different ages, backgrounds, and levels of knowledge about the subject, yet that day everything flowed easily; each of us was moved in our own way.

After getting off the ferry, we walked deep into Luk Tei Tong Village, then climbed a hill—and finally arrived at the Seven Fairies Temple. It was far more sacred than I had imagined, so much that the energy of it startled me. The temple’s history, gathered from fragments and online traces, is quite unusual:

It was founded and run entirely by women. Around the 1970s—some say the 1960s—five women from the village built it together. At first, they enshrined Guanyin Bodhisattva and provided lodging for retired, unmarried women. Among the founders were “Mei Gu” (妹姑, “Younger Aunt”), whose real name was Luo Mei (羅妹), and “Sa So” (四嫂, “Fourth Aunt”), Liu Liwanzhang (劉李玩璋). Mei Gu, the first abbess, led the temple until Sa So took over. Others—Liu Zhou Yuying (劉周玉英), Wu Chen Shuyou (吳陳淑有), and Huang Qu Ruiqing (黃區瑞清)—are less known.

These women purchased the land themselves, built a base for their activities, and gradually began to enshrine more deities. The Seven Fairies became one of them. Later, disputes arose with local residents over land use. In the mid-2010s, villagers discovered bone niches containing the remains of the deceasedbeing installed inside the temple and filed complaints. The caretaker, Liu Liwanzhang (Sa So), explained that she only wanted to provide a resting place for her disciples and believers who had studied the scriptures with her—that it was not for profit but charity. Still, the government rejected the application, and the project was halted.¹

To Yuen Tong Temple

What struck me most inside the temple was first the hall of the deceased, filled with women’s tablets—some accompanied by photographs of female shamans. On the tablets were words like 仙姑 (xian gu, “female immortal / shaman” in Cantonese-Daoist tradition), 修蓮女 (“female cultivator who chants scriptures and joins oracular rites without formal ordination”), 妹姑 (“younger female shaman, or early-stage spirit medium”), and 嫂 (“aunt,” used honorifically for elder women who lead shamanic rituals”). From these alone, it was clear that they were not mere religious devotees—they were shamans.

I began to wonder: could these women have been ZhaiGu (齋姑) of Xiantian Dao (先天道)?

Xiantian Dao was a popular Daoist movement led by women during the late Qing and early Republican periods, worshipping goddesses like Guanyin (觀音) and Yaochi Jinmu (瑤池金母), emphasizing mediumistic communication with the divine. If Buddhism sought enlightenment, Xiantian Dao sought revelation—to convey divine messages and to sustain networks of care.²

In Hong Kong and South China, many vegetarian halls (齋堂) emerged from this tradition—spaces where unmarried women and widows lived together in spiritual sisterhood, maintaining bonds with the divine through chanting and trance. There was even a Xiantian Dao hall in Tai Po District’s Dapu Village (大埔區 運頭塘) with the same name—To Yuen Tong. A temple led by women, housing female mediums, offering food and lodging to women, managing ancestral tablets after death. In the Seven Fairies scriptures found there, phrases implying Xiantian Dao appeared repeatedly. It made me think—this must have been a place where Zhai Gu once lived.

Our friend and local researcher, Belinda, shared another story. She had known this temple for years and once visited during the Seven Fairies Festival. She told us she had witnessed something astonishing: at the time, Liu Liwanzhang, then ninety, was too old to manage the temple, and a young woman from outside had begun assisting her. During one festival, Belinda saw that young woman suddenly possessed by the Seven Fairies. She began dancing, speaking in a high tone, behaving like someone else for about thirty minutes. Perhaps the Seven Fairies descended, moved by her devotion, and chose her as their new medium. But afterward, no one knew what became of her. She wasn’t there when we visited. The temple looked neglected; no women seemed to live there anymore. The communal kitchen was covered in dust and cobwebs.

To Yuen Tong Temple and Seven Fairies Sutra book

To Yuen Tong Temple, Communal kitchen. Many deity figures were placed outside—locals told us that when residents moved away, they left the gods here.

To Yuen Tong Temple

When we went to To Yuen Tong, I only wanted to ask the Seven Fairies for advice about the festival we were preparing at the CHAT museum in September. But the unexpected atmosphere—the strange heaviness of the place, the questions it stirred—lingered, weighing on my mind.

Through these three months of research—and even now, with all my questions still unresolved—I keep asking myself what we can actually learn from those women’s communities of the past. I think I was hoping for an answer of a particular kind, something to assure or console me. But we—I—no longer live in that generation. The circumstances that made it necessary for women to gather and live together under shared faith were bound to another time.

Today, women can live alone, earn their own living, shape their own worlds. As for me, I can’t even imagine myself living in the mountains, far from the city. I don’t want to live frugally like the Comb Sisters of Wanjing Temple (蘊貞堂). I want to live surrounded by beauty, to live secularly, to live lavishly.

More importantly, I think of AFSAR as a kind of public garden (like what Hye-in said)—a place that is precious and communal, but also one where I can shine on my own terms, join sometimes, step back sometimes. I don’t want “together” to be the front of everything.

And besides, gods always reflect the desires of their time, many goddesses are tied to fertility, childbirth, the values of traditional family life. Maybe it’s time their stories were rewritten. Many Taoist or folk goddesses were once human—women who were remarkable in their own time, known in their villages, who refused marriage and became deities by choice. I want to look at their brilliance, their power, through the lens of fandom. Perhaps they, too, must have felt frustrated. In life, they were famed for martial skill or wisdom, and now they spend eternity bestowing babies. And even those who once prayed for children are dwindling.

Wanjing Temple— formerly a Comb Sisters’ house. Three key figures were associated with this place: a Comb Sister, ZhaiGu, and a healer/shaman. The place was absolutely lovely. Nowadays, cultural activities occasionally take place here, and a few reside as caretakers/residents.

Recently, a friend listened to my long ramblings and said, “But we don’t really need that kind of women’s community anymore.” And I agreed. Right—that kind we don’t need. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need community. Or more precisely, it doesn’t mean we no longer need the sense of community.

Maybe that sense no longer depends on a physical place or lifelong devotion, but on something like a returning temporality—a space-time that allows for reappearance, for revisiting. If AFSAR is a public park, then its communal power lies in the fact that anyone can return to it, again and again. It is a ritual time.

And in that sense, there’s no need for constant communication between members. As Byung-Chul Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, we live in an age of excessive communication. But communication doesn’t create community. I’ve spent too much time and energy translating the world, translating myself. I used to think that was my life’s work. But perhaps what I really need to learn now is how to create a space that endures without translation, a space that doesn’t require exhaustion.

Anyway, back to where we were, at the Seven Fairies Festival in Hong Kong, I realized that I had already imagined what I wanted to see—and when it didn’t appear, I carelessly asked, “Why?” Why aren’t women gathering publicly to celebrate? Where have all the ZhaiGu gone? Where are the mediums of the temples? Why has the Seven Fairies faith faded from Hong Kong?

Around the time of the festival, I felt a strange fatigue. We couldn’t visit all seven Seven Fairies temples across Hong Kong, so we went to three: one in Kwong Pan Tin Tsuen in Tsuen Wan, another near Chat Sing Kung, and one on Peng Chau Island.

Chat Sing Kung during Seven Fairies Festival

As expected, there were no women gatherings. Most rituals were led by Taoists—nine out of ten, maybe all of them, men. There are female devotees who practice, yes, but you mostly see them in Buddhist temples, and they don’t lead the rituals. If you’re curious why women traditionally couldn’t become Taoists, or how outdated that idea really is, watch the Hong Kong film The Last Dance by Anselm Chan.

Seven Fairies Festival in Kwong Pan Tin Tseun

The festival in Kwong Pan Tin Tsuen felt less like a public celebration and more like a village gathering—a kind of annual reunion. (I’ll talk more about the devotees of the Seven Fairies in my next letter.) Most of them were middle-aged men who clearly knew each other well. There was an ancestor hall beside the shrine. A few women were present, but they seemed to be there with husbands or families, part of household blessings.

When I asked a local friend why women weren’t there, she said, “They usually light incense and pray at home. And anyway, women from this village move away after marriage.”

So perhaps the female-led rituals disappeared around late 1970s. Even then, they were never official temple events, but neighborhood gatherings—women pooling money through the year and holding rooftop or street festivals. (Elder women we interviewed, former textile workers, remembered them not as a form of faith, but as a social custom of their time.)

When attending the festival, we witnessed its final highlight—the possession by Seven Fairies. Apparently, it happens every year to the same person, who is now a male medium. Villagers lined up to meet him, receiving short blessings. He spoke in a high, like ‘feminine’ tone, greeting each person with a simple phrase like “Stay healthy.”

I was nervous. Since last year in Taiwan, I had thought of the Seven Fairies as my unseen companions, the ones who had led me here. And now they are here, speaking through this man? His words are their words to me? But there was nothing mystical about it. The moment lasted maybe ten seconds. I felt nothing.

Back in the hotel room, Fiber said, “I don’t get it. The Seven Fairies are always with us—so why do we need to meet this medium?” She was puzzled by the idea of a single chosen one. I agreed. A shaman is not a superstar chosen by the gods. A shaman, as Ocean Vuong once said, is someone who tells stories about “a presence that fails to manifest”—a person with slightly sharper sight, offering that vision to those who see less.

A presence that fails to manifest. That was the exact feeling I carried through all three months. Yet, as the saying goes, the things nearest to us are often the hardest to see. I kept asking, perhaps foolishly, “Then where are they?”—the women of the festivals, the women of the shrines, the female devotees, the shamans, their stories.

Only after returning to Berlin did I realize: they were always there. We didn’t fail to meet them—my vision simply wasn’t clear enough to see.

What do I mean by that? That everything we encountered, everything we recorded during those three months—that was them. As I reviewed the footage back in Berlin, I found countless women’s faces within it: the friends who gathered for this journey, the new people we met, the ladies from CHAT museum, the group of women at the temples sitting quietly beside the ritual stages, the praying hands, the handkerchiefs wiping tears, the sunglasses on a terrace watching the Mazu parade, the wrinkled hands crafting festival ornaments, the curious, caring eyes I met while traveling—my camera had followed them all, endlessly.

So why was I still asking where they were? How silly of me.

There were no shamans or devotees left at To Yuen Tong Temple, but we were there. There were the incense sticks we lit, the flowers we placed, the offerings and prayers we left at the Seven Fairies Temple on Peng Chau Island. Wasn’t our journey itself the manifesting of that “presence that fails to manifest”?

This letter has already grown too long, so I’ll stop here for today. In the next one, I’ll bring stories from our travels in China. (it will be shorter than this one, promise!)

October 16, 2025
Mooni Perry

On Death and the Hungry Ghosts

Hello readers,

I was trying to write about my travels in China, but somehow the writing refused to move forward. So I decided to begin with today’s story instead. Today is about death. Between July and September, while I was in Hong Kong and China, the most dominant theme that surfaced again and again was that of the soul and death. I feel that I must digest this story first, so that the next ones can follow naturally. Let’s begin briefly with what the Hungry Ghost Festival is:

The Zhongyuan Festival (中元節) is an East Asian ritual dedicated to ancestral and wandering spirits, born from the fusion of Buddhism’s Ullambana (盂蘭盆節), Daoism’s Three Primordial Beliefs (三元思想), and Confucian filial piety.

On the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month—the day when the gate of the underworld opens—it is believed that hungry souls return to the living world. People offer food, burn joss paper, and pray for the peace of both ancestors and orphaned spirits.

In Daoism, this day celebrates the birthday of the Earth Official (地官大帝), who pardons human sins. In Buddhism, it is explained through the Ullambana Sutra, in which Maudgalyāyana rescues his mother from hell. Across Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities, the day is known as the “Ghost Festival” (鬼節). Temples and streets host pudu (普渡)—rituals of universal salvation—and floating lanterns are set upon the sea to guide lost souls. The Zhongyuan Festival is thus a rite of consolation for the dead and a communal act through which the living reconnect with the cosmic order—a celebration that bridges life and death.¹

I attended the opening ceremony of this Hungry Ghost festival in Shantou, China. It was late at night, and before the main ritual began, we visited a nearby Buddhist temple to sense the atmosphere.

Each culture understands death and the soul differently. In East Asia, under the influence of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and various folk beliefs, diverse customs surrounding death have evolved in each region.

As we all know, nothing on earth exists only in physical form. Every being consists of both body and soul. In Korean shamanism, the soul is divided into three aspects: yeong (靈), hon (魂), and neok (魄). When a person dies, yeongascends to heaven, hon is judged in the underworld over 49 days, and neoklingers for 21 days at the site of death before fading or remaining in this world, often bound by the emotion felt at death—such as resentment or sorrow.

Souls who have long been dead but have not yet reincarnated—those who remain in this world—gradually forget the reason for their death, retaining only their grievance or longing. They wander endlessly and sometimes possess or harm the living. It is the role of shamans to soothe these spirits and help them move on.

In Hong Kong and China, the Hungry Ghost Festival refers to these very souls: hungry ghosts—the wuzhu guhun (無主孤魂), “ownerless wandering spirits.” These are the souls who have no descendants to make offerings for them. In Buddhist terms, they are called agui (餓鬼) or orphaned spirits (孤魂): beings tormented by endless hunger and thirst, roaming between worlds.

Growing up in Korea*, a Confucian society where death rituals mostly concern one’s own ancestors, I found the Hungry Ghost Festival deeply beautiful. To me, it appeared as an act of love for the distant.

In Hong Kong, people celebrate the festival throughout the entire month of August. Not only are food offerings placed outside shops for the wandering souls, but all sorts of paper objects—joss money, paper houses, daily items—are also burned so the dead may use them in the afterlife.

There are three reasons why this festival felt special to me. First, everyone participates. Although many temples host grand ceremonies led by monks and daoist priests, the festival is much closer to everyday life. Even without going to a temple, you encounter it everywhere: outside restaurants, in front of homes, on the street corners.

Hong Kong, in particular, is famous for the ritual called “Break the Hell” (破地獄 / Po Dìyù)—literally, to break open hell. I will explain more about this later.

The second reason is that the festival comforts unrelated souls—those with no family, no name. In Korea, ancestral rites are performed for one’s own kin; that feels familiar. But the essence of the Hungry Ghost Festival is not about honoring those linked by blood/relations—it is about pitying and caring for those who have no one.

Finally, the festival is not a one-time offering but a month-long continuum of rituals and festivities. Operas for the dead, parades, and ceremonies fill the streets. While some rituals in temples are quiet and solemn, most are vibrant—filled with extravagant paper crafts, music, and performance, overflowing with a sense of joy.

(*Of course, in Korea as well, shamans regularly perform cheondo-jae—rituals of salvation—for the many restless, wandering souls. But what distinguished Hong Kong was that these rites were not conducted only by special figures such as shamans or in temples; everyone took part in them.)

What does it mean to console and soothe the forgotten dead? Is it only to prevent them from harming the living? Perhaps partly. Yet to me, it felt like something far more fundamental—a natural instinct of all living beings: compassion without return. The simple kindness of moving a snail off a sidewalk so it won’t be crushed by a bicycle—a gift given without expectation.

One rainy evening in Hong Kong, I witnessed the Break the Hell破地獄 ritual. Many people stood in long lines, each holding a paper tablet bearing the names of their ancestors. Daoists carried these tablets and jumped—literally—through blazing fire over and over again, symbolically opening the gates of hell and releasing karmic suffering. What struck me most, however, was what a local researcher, Belinda, explained: although the daoists hold the ancestral tablets, it is the ancestors themselves who act as intermediaries—they open the gate for the orphaned souls, helping to liberate them.

The rituals I grew up with were always about preserving the inner circle of kinship—family, lineage. The Hungry Ghost Festival, however, expands those boundaries. It is, in essence, a day for all souls—a gesture of compassion rooted in the recognition that, ultimately, all are our ancestors.

Ancestral rites remember the remembered; the Hungry Ghost Festival remembers the forgotten. Through it, the “I” expands beyond myself, my family, my small circle—toward a larger sense of kinship.

Lately I have been thinking constantly about death. There is a strange comfort in knowing that things end. To have a place to return after all this play. The awareness of an ending softens the anxiety of living; life feels, somehow, already complete in itself.

My growing interest in religion has led me to wonder about the differences between ghosts, spirits, and gods—and where the living stand among them. Perhaps, I think, they are all one and linked.

As I continue my study of Korean shamanism, I’ve come to see it—despite regional variations—as a kind of animism blended with Confucianism. Everything in the world is believed to have spirit; life and death are seen as a circulation of souls. Yet relationships with spirits are understood in a distinctly Confucian way. Gods appear to me as ancestors—elder figures of the house. In shamanic belief, some people are accompanied by both ancestral and heavenly spirits; one may come first, the other later. Usually, it is the ancestral spirit who arrives first, as a guardian.

In Buddhism, the Zhongyuan Festival is called Ullambana Zhai (盂蘭盆齋). People often confuse je (祭) and jae (齋): the former means offering food to gods or ancestors, while the latter means purification and preparation for the ritual. Yet the Hungry Ghost Festival combines both—jae here signifies a complete rite that both consoles the dead and purifies the living.

I wish this spirit of this jae could dwell in my everyday life—to live as both the wandering ghost and the moon above; to look at myself and the world with compassion..

I will end here for today. (Today is Halloween!)

October 31, 2025
Mooni Perry

How has the curatorial functioned as a form of colonial discourse in its expansion into art and activism? By what means can we identify the contradictions between its claim to agency and the complex texture of social and political disruption? This essay attempts to critique the colonizing tendencies of curatorial knowledge as it seeks to transform art and activism into an archive of knowledge directed at institutional critique, and prospect other means in which genuine engagement can take place.

This cursory essay is not so much an attempt to provide some far-reaching insight into knowledge production via the rubric that we have come to call “the curatorial,” rather than an opportunity to rethink the parameters of the currency in which the curatorial is imbricated with the political.¹ By this I refer to the increasing currency in which the term “the curatorial,” in instances that have been used by writers/curators like Maria Lind or the Goldsmiths College Curatorial/ Knowledge program, have come to anxiously represent a rhetorical form of interdisciplinary knowledge mapping and discursive performance.² In more recent parlance, it is also described as a kind of “commoning.”

This is in contrast to the idea of curating solely as an activity or a practice of putting together an exhibition or even the pre-contemporary art role of a curator as a caretaker of a collection. Instead, the emphasis on the curatorial is primarily centered on the activation of sites of discourse that purport to be socially and philosophically transformative. Such a claim is problematic, especially if we consider the kind of institutional networks that support this form of performative thinking. As a discursive spectacle that emerged from the 1990s onwards, the curatorial as the epistemological handmaiden of advanced capitalism that continues to align itself within the paradigm of reason along the tradition of the Enlightenment meant that certain blind spots continue to exist even if curatorial discourse makes bold critical claims towards discursive reflexivity.

It is the aim and motivation of the curatorial, when directed at art and activism emerging from “other” parts of the world, that I would like to try to discuss here as a problem area. The very encompassing notion of the curatorial has inadvertently carried within its thinking process an unintended colonizing framework. I believe this has to do with how the notion of the curatorial continues to frame and transform specific urgencies into a form of knowledge that is largely generated within a specific reflexive, promotional, and pedagogical mechanism. In this act of knowledge construction, third world art and activism achieves contemporaneity by becoming an archive, pressed into the service of institutional critique in the first world.

Who really cares about the sweat and tears, meat and grit of context when one is removed from the grinding reality of conflicts and negotiations, the actual pedagogical process that goes into shaping specific engagement, when this can be theorized in London?

One generous view is that this line of inquiry could help resist the uncritical adoption of a hegemonic and dominant form of curatorial forms of inquiry, as well as its attendant institutional standards, from being replicated uncritically elsewhere outside of Europe and America. This is what I took from Irit Rogoffs lecture in Hong Kong at the Asia Art Archive Symposium “Sites of Construction.”³ Her strongest argument undoes the presumption that cultural infrastructure and support automatically guarantees superior culture. In its place, she offered a tentative, but by no means exhaustive list of artist initiatives, including Raqs Media Collective, Collective Situaciones, Tucuman Arde, Oda Projesi, and X-Urban. These are artist initiatives that either take the form of social practice or proceed as engagements with critical theory. Though different in textures and responses, they exist primarily as local enterprises that respond to specific socio-political contexts, and have been clustered by Rogoff under the umbrella of art and activism.

In this manner, the notion of contemporaneity is also framed differently. It is not seen simply as a historical period but as multiple sets of shifting “urgencies” whereby the relationship of contemporary art with the past is defined by its use value for the present political/ideological struggles and critique. Even so, in one fell swoop, the enumerated list of collectives and art practices, collected and abstracted, are constellated within a framing device that renders them objects of study for a different purpose. Here, creative activism is transformed into an archive towards an enterprise whose sole aim is to unpack existing, presumably Western, institutional modes and models of curating as determining what are successful ways of discourse production. Who really cares about the sweat and tears, meat and grit of context when one is removed from the grinding reality of conflicts and negotiations, the actual pedagogical process that goes into shaping specific engagement, when this can be theorized in London?

Southeast Asia as Curatorial Conceit

If one assumes this is strictly an East/West division, let me provide an example of how such curatorial process and thinking can also emerge in other parts of the world by attending to a specific case study.

Take the recent political situation in Thailand as an example since it represents a scenario and a series of evolving and shifting political battle lines that is not entirely black and white. Suffice to say, the complex political scenario suggests that the typology of mass movement, which we so often take to represent the people as a kind of political force, does not always align with democratic processes, even if it claims to.

Ironically, just as the anti-government protest was taking place out on the streets, right outside the doorsteps of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), a survey exhibition “Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia” was being held inside it. The exhibition attempted to bring into discussion art practices that demonstrated “locally-rooted conceptual thinking used to actively engage audiences [...] CCC investigates the close connection between conceptual approaches and social ideologies in Southeast Asian contemporary art of the last four decades.”⁴

The antinomies between the kind of struggle that was taking place outside on the street and the abstracted grounds of contestation drawn out inside the gallery, where social justice calls the artist activist/conceptual figure into being, could not have been more stark. The exhibition constellates a group of conceptual artworks from “Southeast Asia” and presents them as both an archive and social critique.

Are there phenomena out there that resist the curatorial?

Besides the fact that most of the artists showcased are in fact household names in the art collector circuit, the curatorial premise that argues that a significant feature of Southeast Asian conceptual practice is colored by a political commitment is extremely vague to the point of uselessness.⁵ How this is political is not enumerated other than facile artistic engagement with notions of history, memory, and politics.

It seems that in this instance, the curatorial has signaled the ever-present possibility in which institutional discourse subsumes radical politics. While the curatorial premise held out some posture of reflexivity by considering the region as a comparative frame in order to postulate a shared history over and beyond the silos of national art histories, it is achieved at the expense of addressing certain blind spots within its own discursive mechanism. In the case of the exhibition, not only are specific positions and histories abstracted through the conceit of the comparative, in comparison with the energy on the street outside of the BACC, what the curatorial did was to flatten the texture of protest, its motivation, context, and concept – even as it claims to recover these potentialities as strategic archives.

The Artful and the Artless

The comparison above therefore brings to the fore the question about whether “contemporary art” as an ecology and institution really has any special purchase on the present. The following discussion attempts to address this through a number of case studies. In an Art Basel Hong Kong’s talk program some years ago, an interesting observation was made during the launch of a newly released monograph on the late Tsang Tsou Choi, the mad graffiti calligrapher, who is better known as the King of Kowloon.⁶

What piqued my interest was that during the talk the Chinese cultural critic Ou Ning took the opportunity to draw parallels between Tsang’s practice and a relatively young figure in Hong Kong’s activism scene, Joshua Wong. Prior to the umbrella movement,⁷ the then fifteen-year-old Joshua Wong was already seen as a kind of boy wonder figure who founded a movement called Scholarism in 2011, where he managed to mobilize a group of secondary school students to oppose the Moral and National Education school curriculum introduced by the Hong Kong Education Bureau.

The new school curriculum sought to revise how Hong Kong history is being taught. This change was perceived by the youth of Hong Kong to be ideologically skewed in what it says about Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong, even under the “one nation, two system” arrangement, Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese government in 1997 under the promise that the island would retain a large measure of internal autonomy, including universal suffrage, which the country still, debatably, does not enjoy today. Here, it is significant to highlight how Ou Ning had managed to connect these two phenomena together.

Now I want to compare Ou Ning’s statement to a statement made by Ili Farhana, a Malaysian writer and activist. Farhana noted on her blog:

“Up until today, involvement between art and activism in Malaysia is still a rare occurrence. Not to say it doesn’t exists, but it is rare. Protests in Malaysia if compared to those that took place in other countries, lack color. It is often about speeches and heated admonition that at the end of the day weakens the momentum of the masses if it is the only thing that is being offered to the masses. We do not ask to be entertained but to seek the intersection between the artistic/cultural and the mass movement, that should come together to bring about change in the country.”⁸

On the one hand, we have in the Malaysian case an anxiety that social protest in and of itself is insufficient if it does not possess a creative element – elements I presume that are meant to add a little creative spark to the protest, to make it exceed the dullness and tedium of politics. In doing so, not only does it seek to transform the terms of art, it also seeks to quite naively rethink politics as possibly more creative. While on the other hand, you have someone like Ou Ning, who has no desire at all to seek out that “creative element” or spark within a social protest movement. So it’s almost as if the entire protest form itself, without any form of creative additives, was sufficiently artful on its own terms and that what art or culture (or the sphere we operate within as historians, curators, and artists) needs to do, is to make a claim of this discourse. We don't really have anything to add to this space really, all we have to do is to consume it and make it part of our own “cultural discourse.”

I find both examples interesting in their desire to bridge this almost unbridgeable chasm between the larger political issue and the location of the creative and the aesthetic within this space. Our desire to fetishize mass movement and energies is apparent: think of Egypt, Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, Syria, Bangkok, and Taiwan. We search for a creative sign of life within turmoil, but what exactly are we in fact searching for?

In recent years, I find myself following some of the most artless controversies that have visited Asia. For example, Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee, or known collaboratively as Alvivi until their recent breakup, was best known for sharing their sex videos online. They also ran a confessional and bare-all sex confession channel on YouTube in 2012 that has made both Singaporeans and Malaysians recoil in horror at their antics and derring-dos.

What happens to things that you cannot explain away by reason and discourse?

The other personality that has made recent headlines is Singaporean rabble-rouser Amos Yee, who incidentally calls himself an “artist” on his Facebook page. Though he started making YouTube videos at the age of thirteen, which ranged from a review of Moby Dick to homemade movies, his claim to notoriety can be attributed to a video that lambasted both the Christian Right and Lee Kuan Yew, shortly after the latter’s passing in 2015.

What do these YouTube personalities have in common? In a sense, their deep-seated distrust towards cultural norms is expressed through a refusal to play by the rules of the system, harboring a deep suspicion for any systematized and industrialized forms of pedagogy. Unlike Simon Castets’s and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s search for post-1989 digital natives who still operate within the glib performance of civil discourse, Alvivi and Amos Yee are decidedly belligerents in their refusal to even be civil or governable through the regulatory and spectacle power of discursive performance.⁹

Is it therefore not surprising that in within a kind of curatorial ecology that increasingly prizes curatorial education in centers such as Bard College, Goldsmiths, and de Appel that a certain discursive density emerges from which the above “artists” cannot be assimilated or tamed due to their belligerence? Ultimately, this leads me to the question: are there phenomena out there that resist the curatorial? If we assume that the curatorial owes some of its operative logic to the faculty of reason of the Enlightenment and yet is a thinking process that has emerged specifically in the era of late capitalism, can there be a space where we can escape from the curatorial? What happens to things that you cannot explain away by reason and discourse?

Now, I am not going to be like Ou Ning to say that what Alvivi and Amos Yee did constitute a kind of cultural practice (let alone “art”) that suddenly needs to be framed in relation to some kind of curatorial knowledge about the contemporary condition/culture or art. I don’t want to colonize what they are doing into our knowledge, whether this is art historical or curatorial. Including them in a story about Singaporean and Malaysian visual cultural history, or exhibiting them, doesn’t seem to do justice to it.

What I want to suggest here is the incommensurable gulf between what Alvivi and Amos Yee are doing as a possible space for activism that exceeds what we are trying to frame or discuss when we try to understand the precarious and slippery concept of art and activism combined. In fact, I want to hold them up as a mirror of the kind of conceptual blind spot on our part to recognize the limits of the curatorial as a field. A field that continues to call itself progressive still believes that it is trendy, liberal, forward thinking, yet at the same time seeks out the entirely formulaic and repetitive. Do we then need to revise the terms of our engagement?

Curiosity

Where do we go from here? There is really no new method that I want to suggest here. I would only tentatively suggest what has been understood by most if not all curators, yet this is something that is often held up as more of an ideal than a necessity or a precondition for any form of work that one does. One must work from a genuine compulsion to know, driven by curiosity rather than urgency.

It calls for a kind of anthropology of sustained inquiry. This means that one does not treat the curatorial simply as a deconstructive paradigm. One’s research needs to proceed from a genuine unpacking of assumptions rather than navel-gazing at the epistemological processes that inform the curatorial.

Proceeding from the above, an understanding of the world does not stem from the violent enterprise of mapping. It has less to do with how many disciplinary terrains, knowledge domains, and geographic localities one can traverse and bind together through the stagecraft of the curatorial or what kind of descriptive paradigm one can summon to bring the world into relief. Instead, a turn towards curiosity calls for a genuine desire to know another through experience, so that the other not only becomes valuable and urgent, solely when it becomes an archive for those in a privileged position to critique their own institutional procedure.

As an example, I will not turn to an exhibition but to a film, and one that embodies such an expanded notion of curatorial knowledge. This suggests I am not so much against this expansion of the curatorial as a form of knowledge and practice than the specific vectors that such discussions have so far engendered. This is also in keeping with the spirit of the curatorial to dislodge the exhibition space and practice as the primary site in which the curatorial could manifest itself. I refer here to Tan Pin Pin’s documentary film Invisible City, in which she cataloged the obsessions that the world at large might not deem to be significant, but nevertheless resonate with those individual actors who have lived through a certain moment in Singapore’s history.

Reflecting on the documentary, Tan notes: “I decided to seek out people who, like me, choose Singapore as the topic of their work. I don’t mean where Singa­pore is the setting for their work, but where Singapore is the main subject.”¹⁰

Her film explores Singapore through the viewpoints of four idiosyncratic, but highly colorful residents who have lived through Singapore at the cusp of her independence. They are: Ivan Polunin who produced numerous films of native communities in Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s; Marjorie Doggett, who has a collection of photographs she took from the 1950s of old buildings that are now demolished; Han Tan Juan, a student activist who showed a collection of photographs connected to the Chinese middle school student riots; Lim Chen Sian, an archaeologist excavating a sixty-year-old military bunker on Sentosa island. These are personal obsessions, traumas, and memories at best, but stitched together with their voices ricocheting against the other they offer a vision of the island-city through the lens of social and cultural history that is vastly different in tone and texture from that of Singapore’s political history.

This catalog of obsessions is fascinating to me on two counts. All our talks of a transnational turn have occluded those committed to localities. The focus in this instance demonstrates a stubborn refusal to speak of the global only from one particular vantage, from one particular frame of mind. Does digging up a fifty-year-old Coke bottle in a Singapore army bunker, in the annals of archaeol­ogy, have any global resonance? However, the film-making methodology as a curatorial device here takes the risk of translating one archaeologist’s obsession, compelling the filmmaker to take responsibility in the way we read the other instead of abnegating this responsibility in favor of solipsistic critique of the very enterprise of curating.

In doing so, the film is also committed to a trenchant refusal towards parity or a sense of coexistence that has been taken as a hallmark of contemporaneity. Rather than pit the global as a circuit against the national, the local offers other historical frames of reference that are equally significant and that are equally multitudinous in their ability to challenge official national history. In this argument against the coexistence of concepts, one turns against the desire to catch up with the world, and instead argues for a speaking to the world from other positions. The history of the world can be shaped through other visions and locales outside of putative centers.

In a wonderful exchange where director Tan Pin Pin is interviewing Ivan Polunin, a medical officer who shot color footage of native communities in his study of tropical diseases in the 1950s, reached a kind of impasse when confronted by a subject who reflected on her curatorial gaze.

Off camera: Can I ask you ...
Ivan: You can definitely ask me, but whether you get an answer is another matter.
Off camera: I’ll try any way.
Ivan: Whether you get a satisfactory answer is very much another matter.

This leads me to the second point. The above exchange demonstrates a struggle on the part of the director to come to grips with her subject and in that scenario, it also shows us something akin to curatorial sincerity when one is summoned to the task of interpretation.

In what Tan does, her curiosity does not merely become a catalog of obsession in order to deconstruct disciplinary thinking, but extends beyond the need to address the anxiety of genuine political transformation, to manifest and give the very obsession of her subjects a voice in their particularities. In this way, the film does not need to anxiously declare its relevance as an emancipatory space of the political, since the curiosity of the other that drives Tan’s filmmaking is already transparent. The question of ethical sympathy is less of a sleight of hand than a willingness to listen. So too, I think, should be the curatorial.

Every day I take a moment to quietly reaffirm my motivations for working in the arts, for I’ve got to be frank, I once nearly quit on my passion. Utterly. At a too-early point in my career, I had grown oh-so-tired of the way neoliberal systems of institutional approval were dictating how artistic innovation was allowed to take form and be interpreted—a stance touted to respect the inspiration of artists from far-flung locales with differing determinations of “contemporaneity,” but sadly felt more like a colonisation of their productive processes. What sustained my practice within these particular glass-encased white cube bureaucracies of Museology was the critical intimacy cultivated in my curatorial department—these were rare and special friendships of regional artistic knowledge.¹ Indeed, Management was wary of our closeness.

Ever since, the presence of friendship in my field has been of key consideration in the work I have chosen to do. I value this space of intimacy as the most discerning base of knowledge in the arts. In my decision to exit the “professionalised” landscape of government-supported arts infrastructure in Australia for the ideologically monitored, commercially hoodwinked terrain of China and Vietnam, I came to understand just how significant friendship is to sustaining the development of artistic languages and forms—how it can provide political autonomy with a powerful organised presence. Thus I have gleaned much about the purpose of art and its relevance from the social spaces of artists; indeed, these domestic environments of friendship crucially shape my work.

And what is this “work”? It's the building of care towards independent houses of culture that are rooted in the formal and vernacular artistic languages of their localities today. They are immaterial and concrete, often small in size yet holding dreams as vast as the sky, whose charge of memory is grasped as living souls that count for a collective consciousness—a never-ending social network of differing pulse whose objects and ephemerality deserve constant re-categorisation. I'm talking particularly about houses of culture built by artists that dwell together in landscapes of psychological pain and political poverty; where to be visible and publicly interactive is to incur possible conflict; where the power in friendship is an alliance, a crucible of remembering and resilience; where the power in friendship becomes the means to politically challenge those who seek to define you.

My work is referred to as “curating,” but to me it is about the dialogical intertextuality of engaging artists and their art to create encounters between aesthetics and politics²—it's about facilitating time, performing time, imprinting time, and dare I say producing time. It is about caring for the way memory is locally visualised and responsibly provoked; it's about interpreting, describing, and collecting the adhesive presence of time between memory and emotion, between form and its political legitimacy, between shadows opaque, liquid, and porous. Time that only those in friendship can truly critically understand. For it is within friendship that the production of Representation—the journey towards that final destination called an Artwork by an Artist—is able to remain nameless. I say nameless for it is in naming that we are coded, thus presumed spoken for. I say nameless for it is in friendship (that code, that bond, beyond Law) that the Face of the artist, the author, is permitted the space to Be.³ It is within this space of friendship—the qualities of respect, trust, reliability, credibility, constancy, openness—that namelessness can look with unconditioned eyes on its surroundings, can learn of its interdependency on the facts and legends of its people (perhaps the Filipina would call it “kapwa”⁴), allowing the idea to learn how to breathe, to figure its own relationship to the world, to beg friendship to make introduction to discursiveness sturdier, to come up with a name that reflects the dreams inherent to its conjuring, to hope that its eventual interface does not enter the aesthetic regime with only one stride.

But this profession of mine is a deeply uneven one in definition and practice, and ultimately hinges on the geographies and social networks with which we live and devote. In this wondrous calamity of difference, I believe the context of art and culture must be facilitated, and I believe such facilitation requires physical and psychological space that is carefully weighted between local and global meaning. Some curators believe their key task to contribute to a history of exhibitions; in an ecology of cultural lack, however, I believe my key task is to sustain critically thinking creative communities of friendship.

But let's revisit Time. If I click “Yes” on a friendship request on Facebook, am I thus now a “friend”? If I set up an art project in Saigon as a social enterprise engaging victims of human trafficking along the border region with China, yet I've never spent time with such a victim, do I truly believe in my work? If I curate an art exhibition in London of Syrian contemporary art with artists I don't even physically recognise, am I demonstrating care in knowing the depth of my naming their dreams into words has consequence, particularly considering the global depravity of their ongoing civil war? How important is the investment of shared experiential time to build interpersonal networks that responsibly define who we are and what we do as curators working transnationally in the twenty-first century?

In speaking of this Occupation of mine—curating—I'd like it to invest more “time” in understanding an artist and the conditions with which their art is given meaning, presence, and value in the sites that gave birth to its existence. With the current speed of the global systematisation of art, and its palate to collect and showcase the “global” within museum and biennale platforms, I think it crucial that such systems care about the impact of its tourism on local communities struggling to sustain criticality with their own cultural knowledge. The attitude with which we produce, display, consume, and interpret contemporary art should be supportive of sustaining its diversity in production and meaning.

And here I must return to friendship, for it is sadly not the acclaimed venue notches of an artist's curriculum vitae that a depth of exchange with artistic sites of production is practiced—not the likes of MoMA or the Tate; not the Venice Biennale or Art Basel. Their showcase-driven, marketable (and thus timetabled) arms hold the interface (the artwork) aloft from the context of its production as opposed to considering how to give those arms increased dimension, to give physical articulation to such context. It is rather within the smaller, grassroots, guerilla-like, “alternative” collective spaces of action, at the local level, that arms and hands are found in provocative swat and caress, where time is of currency in encouraging patient constructive thinking.

If only these two planets of social capital could sit at a regular table and share a meal of time, perhaps then we could discuss the impact of shifting the situatedness of an “exhibition”⁵; or perhaps better implement a research strategy for collecting art by which knowledge networks from the local ecologies’ major museums seek to acquire are integrated as friendships into departmental structures of museum life.⁶ I must emphasise here again why I say “friendships” (as opposed to “professional appointments”) for friendship demands a respect for time, a deference for the long-term in building social forms of knowledge, a respect for the role of honour in failure while searching for success. In contexts of suppressed psychological pain and political poverty particularly (think Syria with Doxbox; think Cuba with Immigrant International; think Congo with Studio Kabako; think Cambodia with SaSa Art Projects; think Vietnam with Sàn Art; think Sri Lanka with Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Design and so many more…), it is the silken thread of friendship that sustains, gives purpose, and ultimately breeds a respect for knowledge and memory that is nurturing and under constant re-evaluation. The physical walls of these houses of culture are often crumbling, contested, mobile, virtual, or publicly inaccessible and thus trust is of urgency to ensure survival.

This is not to say that “professional appointments” are void of such bonds, and I am sure I will find readers thinking I am overly idealistic with my romance of friendship in the context of art and its production/facilitation here, but what I am trying to say is that a curatorial address book needs to remember the impact of context on human intelligence and its cultural underpinnings. Speed dating parachute meetings by visiting curators turn art into a factory of showcase with no depth, and I have witnessed first-hand just how many of these visits critique and leave young artists utterly gutted, confused, and helpless. We need to practice friendship across our transnational planets of differing understandings of time to give structures of social capital the chance to interlock.

“Only primary friendship is stable (bebaios), for it implies decision and reflection: that which always takes time…” Derrida says. “A decision worthy of the name—that is a critical and reflective decision—could not possibly be rapid or easy, as Aristotle then notes, and this remark must receive all the weight of its import.”⁷ I wonder what Derrida would say if tasked to comment on the interpersonal networks of “guanxi,” for it is in this system of social reciprocity and mutual benefit in China and Vietnam—an interpersonal network of friendship anchored in nurturing long-term exchange⁸ that I have witnessed respect and knowledge expand, opportunities facilitated, and contacts of social currency gained. I am speaking particularly of my experiences in China and Vietnam, these countries that were violently thrown into a “globalising” industrial competition, where local “culture” has been systematised by paranoid political surveillance mechanisms who argue patriotism, nationalism, and profit as key determinants of approval. In such environs (and there are many other similar landscapes of cultural control—think the divisive and brutal religious doctrines that have mired Afghanistan, India, and Myanmar, for example), the infrastructure for the arts is incredibly lacking in funds, facilitation, and space, and it is thus the interpersonal networks of artistic friendships that enable and innovate this lack, who invoke historical consciousness embedded within artistic languages “by courting, by creating . . . that begging bowl to which the gift is drawn.”⁹

Of course the instrumentalisation of such a “begging bowl” can be dark, intelligibly limiting, and hauntingly violent (corruption in business; cronyism in politics), but that is where the agency of such networks has been foiled by ego, and where reciprocity has lost its mindfulness. Yes, I say “mindfulness” as opposed to “utility,” and now perhaps we have Buddha sharing a cup of tea with Aristotle in this little duel, but I say “mindfulness” for its Being “present,” for its acknowledgment of interconnected cyclical dependencies and, thus, the interwoven urgency to be held responsible for its cause and effect. Friendships can be useful in practice—we take advantage of what the Other can provide—social introductions to beneficial people, sharing of skills, a sage for advice, but friendships are also virtuous bound beyond profit, beyond “use.”

I may be impractical in my plea for time, for friendship, to be respected within the showcase and collection of art, but I think in the increasing entertainment frenzy of event management and a rationalised capitalistic system of cultural accountability, we must remember “[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”¹⁰



Saigon
22 November 2015