A few months into his Curatorial Research Fellowship at Chisenhale Gallery, Zhejun Gao shared with us his practice on trauma, archives, and navigating new curatorial contexts.

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ASYMMETRY: You have been researching collective traumas in China and Southeast Asia through your long-term project 'Exploring Traumas, Exploding Archives', since 2022. What first prompted your interest in the subject?

ZHEJUN: What led me to this subject was my own experience of trauma, such as undergoing intensive surveillance during the COVID-19 health crisis. During that time, I came to understand how vulnerable individuals can become in the face of structural violence, and how a collective recognition of suffering can become a source of solidarity, mutual support, and even a catalyst for change. Trauma can be negative, generative, and unspeakable; its multiplicity is what I keep returning to.

China and Southeast Asia form a region deeply marked by trauma, through colonial exploitation, wartime violence, and ongoing class struggles. Many of these histories remain largely untold, and to explore them is not just about filling gaps but about examining the forces behind them that have shaped the collective silence; these forces still continue to operate in our present, albeit in more elusive forms.

I reject simplifying trauma to a binary of perpetrator and victim, and I resist the romanticisation of artistic practice as a form of justice. Many works dealing with trauma tend to fall into these patterns, eventually becoming mouthpieces for certain ideologies. For me, the journey of exploring collective trauma ultimately leads back to individual lives — lives that are vivid, complex, and impossible to neatly define.

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A: What does it mean for you to take archives as a site of inquiry

Z: My interest in archives emerged from my research into trauma, where I encountered a variety of research-based practices that dealt with displacement and family memory. I critically engage with archives not only as a source of information, but also as materials full of tension, absence, and memory. Archives are not static or dead, they are living and capable of generating new meanings.

My methodological approach sees archives not as objective containers of historical fact but as dynamic spaces where knowledge, memory, and authority are continuously negotiated. Rather than simply mining archives for ‘fact’, I am more interested in the circumstances of their construction; archives are never neutral nor truthful.

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A: With the fellowship, you have relocated from Shanghai to London and begun work at Chisenhale Gallery. What does this moment of change represent for you?

Z: Calling it a ‘decisive moment’ in my career may be an overstatement, but it is undoubtedly a turning point, shaped by luck, challenge, and a fair share of uncertainty. I’m grateful to begin this fellowship and to connect with new peers and colleagues. The differences between Shanghai and London’s arts ecosystems and their daily working rhythms are clear. But for me, it is never about good or bad; it is about how each individual finds a sustainable position to work and live in. At a time when the art world is increasingly fractured, jumping out of one’s comfort zone is never easy, but hasn't art always emerged from uncertainty and from the questions that we’re willing to live with?