As a mark of the end of Zhejun Gao’s Asymmetry Curatorial Research Fellowship at Chisenhale Gallery, Soft restitution brings together the research, questions and encounters that have shaped his enquiry into the possibilities of restitution beyond its conventional legal and institutional frameworks.
In his essay, Zhejun writes:
Soft restitution is, in the end, a provisional term and a placeholder for a much longer conversation. My intention here is not to theorise the practices of the artists I have interviewed, nor to offer policy recommendations. It is simply to sit with the points of overlap and resonance that emerged from those encounters, and to ask what they might tell us about restitution as it is lived. If this publication has a central claim, it is this: that return should not be simplified as an event of transfer but a dynamic and ongoing process, one that demands continuous revision as relationships shift, contexts change, and new claims come into view.
Alongside the essay, the publication includes his conversations with Gala Porras-Kim, Dr Maria Cristina Martinez Juan, and Beichen Zhang. Across different artistic, institutional and research contexts, the conversations consider how displaced objects and contested histories might be approached through practices of care, imagination and ongoing relationship.