Reading Group I
6.30—8pm, 01.05.2025
This session prompts its participants to read Jacques Rancière’s essay, Good Times, Or, Pleasure at the Barrière, in Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (2011), with respect to the Chinese Contemporary context. Rancière’s essay focuses on working-class social and cultural gatherings in 19th-century France, exploring a distinct proletarian political-aesthetic experience within what is often dismissed as mere leisure and entertainment. One can think of, for instance, the cultural and historical shift marked by the supersession of spaces, a shift that leaves its traces in recent films such as Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) (2023) and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024).
Reading Group II
6.30—8pm, 29.05.2025
This session will focus on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Traveling in the Dark (2023), a publication that evolved from the eponymous exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Traveling in the Dark expands upon Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film What about China? Instead of offering a direct answer to the film’s titular question, the artist takes us on a journey through 1990s rural China, one that is marked by obscurities, diversions, and unexpected detours.
Reading Group III
6.30—8pm, 12.06.2025
This session dives into François Jullien’s book, In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (2007), which raises and explores a seemingly paradoxical question: How can blandness—a quality often associated with lack, and contrasted with the spectacular and extraordinary—offer an experience of profound richness and fullness, ultimately establishing itself as a virtue?
Screening Programme
2–4pm, 17.05.2025
In February 2013, artist Li Mu opened a library in his home village Qiuzhuang in Jiangsu province, China, and produced copies of works from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and distributed them among the villagers. This process unfolding constitutes the ‘Qiuzhuang Project’—a deeply layered and thought-provoking work that challenges the raison d'etre of artistic, cultural, curatorial, and institutional practices.
The screening programme features Part I of Li Mu’s four-part documentary Qiuzhuang Log (2015), followed by a conversation between Weitian and Jingsi Wang.