How are we to live together in an ecologically entangled yet politically divided world? How do we live in a situation simultaneously marked by our differences and our shared struggle? How are we to imagine a world in which all living things can flourish?
The upcoming edition of Tai Kwun Conversations – Summer Institute #5: The Future of the Body is a Body of the Past and a Body of Porosity features professor Zairong Xiang, whose research draws from multiple areas, including art, literature, philosophy, religion, and sex/gender, together with Dr. Lili Lai, whose research interests focus on the body, everyday life, and medical practice.
This conversation will start with what we have: the body, or more precisely, its orifices. Presenting a “perverse” reading of passages from The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, the Daodejing, and I Ching (Book of Changes), the talk will borrow elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine and philosophy to explore the various connections to the porous body-of-orifices that exist in and between the texts and sexuality, knowledge, and the cosmos. What can contemporary debates in queerness, knowledge formation, and decolonisation draw as inspiration from both the heuristic apophasis deployed in the ancient texts in question and the idea of bodily porosity featured in them? Looking into the past and its porous connection to the present, we can imagine what a porous queer cosmo-logy/-politanism might look like and what it can do to circumvent the pitfalls of the imperio-heteronormativity represented by major neoliberal cosmopolitanism and the colonial-homonormativity of queer liberalism.
This talk is a crossover event of Tai Kwun Conversations and Summer Institute #5. Tai Kwun Conversations is a monthly event that brings together brilliant minds from the fields of contemporary art, architecture, heritage, among many others. Summer Institute is a two-week programme of tertiary education seminars and distinguished public lectures focused on students and art professionals from Hong Kong and Asia. Apply now for a unique chance to work closely with some of the most important art theorists and thinkers, curators, artists, and philosophers in the world.
Summer Institute #5: Future Bodies invites seven scholars to share their research on historical and contemporary discourses on the body, examining the evolution and development of the notion of the body, with respect to “transdualism”, critical data studies, biohacking, neuroscience, and sex/gender studies. In the process, they will explore multiple ways to imagine and realise new futures within our existing systems and social structures.
This event will be conducted in English, with English to Cantonese simultaneous interpretation.