Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
Current Pacific Crossings’ Curatorial resident, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Times Museum (Guangdong, China), will give a talk about her practice on October 3rd, 6:30 pm at the Chinese Canadian Museum.
Over the past decade, as Chief Curator of Times Museum, Nikita has been focusing on curating a network of people, spaces, objects and ideas in the region of the Pearl River Delta-a frontier of contemporary art in China. Cai will present the research-based projects she initiated at Times Museum, and share her experiences in how artistic expressions and practices are translated, fabricated and contextualized in the curatorial process. She will also map a variety of human and non-human actors, such as labor, virus, river, port, island, plant etc., in the forming and relocating of a frontier-where the region transformed from an agricultural frontier to a frontier of “Reform and Open” in the 1990s, and subsequently redistributes its labor-intensive manufacturing resources and extracting capital. By inserting artworks, artistic concepts and investigations into already existing conditions and setting up a friction between them, shadowed context repressed by the developmental mentality is activated and may subsequently change what we think it is all about. In this sense, the curatorial incubates imaginations to blur boundaries and categorizations, thus challenging their constraining powers.
Nikita Yingqian Cai has curated such exhibitions as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016), Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Guangdong Times Museum, 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Berlin, 2019), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019), and Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021). She runs the series and the research network of “All the Way South,” and is the co-editor of On Our Times and the podcast host of Rolling Congee. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019.
ABOUT PACIFIC CROSSINGS
Pacific Crossings is an ongoing conversation and public presentation series that draws participants from various regions across the ocean. This collaborative project works to bring together perspectives in an evolving and dynamic exchange, instigating events and activities that can increase public awareness of the multitude of traditions, histories, and practices, offering potential routes for intersections to take place.
Pacific Crossings acknowledges that it takes place on the unceded Territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and Snuneymuxw First Nations. It was first conceived by Bopha Chhay, Allison Collins, Shaun Dacey (Richmond Art Gallery), and Makiko Hara, and is currently programmed by Collins, Dacey, Hara, Jesse Birch (Nanaimo Art Gallery), and Henry Heng Lu.
Pacific Crossings would like to thank the BC Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport for making this program possible.
