To Speculate, Of Nature

Now that we have changed the earth, how will it change us? Five young artists born in China, and trained in art schools in the United States, ask and answer this question in strange and evocative multimedia works. They imagine, fantasize, experiment, research, and speculate. They do so not upon nature, as if it were still an object for humankind to shape, but of nature. They do so in conversation with peacocks, arachnids, fish, gravity, and the moon. They take their departures from an abandoned zoo, the harvest moon, a space orbiter, and a rocket. They remind us that what we unfeathered beings have are our breath, our teeth, our fists, and that these too, might change.

NanHai Art is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring the following artists:

Yi Xin Tong Born in 1988 in Lushan, China, Yi Xin Tong is currently a New York-based artist, musician, and amateur fisherman. Tong uses sculpture, installation, web project, video, and sound to create poetic and seemingly innocuous work to allude to the contradictions in life and to express dissent. Recent exhibitions include NARS Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MOCA Shanghai, and CAFA Art Museum. Tong has received a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant and Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship.

Future Host Future Host is a New York–based performance ensemble named after an epithet commonly bestowed to children in official socialism, who are posited as the site, agent, and product of socialist futures. Their performance appeared at the Museum of Chinese in America, The Knockdown Center, Movement Research, The Dixon Place, TPAM Performing Arts Festival in Yokohama, Japan, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Xin Liu Born in 1991 in Xinjiang, China, Xin Liu is an artist and engineer, whose research-based projects range from performances, apparatus, installations to scientific experiments and academic papers. She is currently the Arts Curator in Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of New INC in New Museum and a resident in Queens Museum Artist Studio program. She is a recipient the Van Lier Fellowship from Museum of Arts and Design, Huayu Youth Award Finalist, Queens Museum studio program and Pioneer Works Tech Residency. Her projects have received awards in SXSW, FastCoDesign, Core77 and her academic publications were nominated for best papers in ACM conferences.

Kunlin He Born in 1992 in Nanchang, China, Kunlin He currently lives in San Francisco, CA.  His work focuses on redefining Asian identities, territories, borders, nationalisms, as well as Chinese masculinity in traditional art and philosophy. He is a graduate fellow and affiliated artist at Headlands Center for the Arts (2017-2019) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Pennsylvania State University, among others.

About the curator:
Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. Her articles have appeared in positions: asia critiques, the Journal of Visual Culture, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and she has written for Omagiu, Third Text Asia, and Artforum. She is currently associate professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.