Librarians-in-Residence

CHANG YUCHEN: 'CORAL DICTIONARY VOL.1: 2019-2022'
PERFORMATIVE LECTURE AND CONVERSATION WITH ALVIN LI

Asymmetry, 102a Albion Drive, London E8 4LY
6PM, 16.06.2023

Image courtesy of Chang Yuchen

Please join us for a book launch for Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022. Yuchen will present a performative lecture on her feral literacy, while demonstrating how to read, use, and dance with this newly-published dictionary. The second half of the evening will feature a conversation between Alvin Li and Yuchen, where they will discuss practices of translation and lexicography in relation to their recent collaborative project as Librarians-in-Residence at Asymmetry.

Including 216 words that Yuchen has translated with fragments of coral bodies, Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022 is a tool book customly designed for one person’s need in her ongoing endeavor of making a language. The dictionary includes an introduction by Alvin Li, and is published by Gong Press in two versions. Limited copies of Coral Dictionary Vol.1, 2019-2022  will be available at the event. They can also be purchased online at https://www.gongpress.art/.

FREE ENTRY, BOOK HERE

BIOGRAPHIES

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner - writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. By constantly entering and exiting each medium, she strolls against the category of things, the labor division among people.

Yuchen was a recipient of Kahn | Mason SIP Fellowship, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award Grand Jury Prize, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant and Luminarts Fellowship. She has shown/performed her work at Artists Space, UCCA Dune, Power Station of Art, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary, Abrons Art Center and more. She was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, NARS x Governors Island, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Textile Arts Center. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, Randian, and she lectures/teaches at Yale University, University of the Arts, Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter, among others.

Alvin Li is a writer and curator based in London, where he is Adjunct Curator, Greater China, supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, at Tate. He has served as Contributing Editor of frieze magazine since 2018, and was Artistic Advisor of the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2022. His writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in international publications such as frieze, Artforum, e-flux and e-flux Architecture, Mousse, Spike Art Quarterly, and ArtReview Asia, as well as in catalogues and anthologies published by the New Museum, New York; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Dancing Foxes Press; and Sternberg Press, among others. In 2021, his year-long research on Uyghur rap as seen through the lens of China’s changing language and ethnic policies was published in The Contest of the Fruits (MIT Press, 2021) edited by Guangtian Ha and Slavs and Tatars. As a fiction writer, he has featured in Spike Art Quarterly and held readings at the Cell Project Space in London in 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2020 and at the CURRENT: LA Public Art Triennial in 2019.

Gong Press is a publishing project by Qianfan Gu (based in New York), St. Jiu (based in Beijing), and Yuki He (based in New York). We produce art publications in collaboration with our artist friends. The project is named after the weapon “GONG (弓, bow)”: like a bow without an arrow, Gong Press exists in a state of quiet and dormant potency, ready to be activated through creative collaborations.