The New Social Environment#865
Contemporary Queer Chinese Art
Featuring Hongwei Bao, Diyi Mergenthaler, and Paul Gladston, with Sahar Khraibani
to
5 p.m. Eastern / 2 p.m. Pacific
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Scholars Hongwei Bao and Diyi Mergenthaler join Rail contributor Paul Gladston for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Sahar Khraibani.
In this talk
Hongwei Bao
Dr. Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Queer Comrades, Queer China, Queer Media in China and Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, and co-editor of Contemporary Queer Chinese Art. He serves on the editorial boards of British Journal of Chinese Studies, Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Political Cinemas book series (Edinburgh University Press) and Queer Asia book series (Hong Kong University Press). He also co-edits Oyster: Feminist and Queer Approaches to Arts, Cultures and Genders (de Gruyter) and Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities (Bloomsbury).
Diyi Mergenthaler
Diyi Mergenthaler is a Ph.D candidate at the Institute of Art history at the University of Zurich. She obtained her MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies with distinction at the University of Leeds in 2017. Her current research project investigates queer artworks created by artists, activists, curators and critics in mainland China and the Chinese diaspora in Europe from the 1980s to the present. In May 2021, she organised the Zoom workshop, titled “Queering the Boundaries of the Arts in the Sinosphere,” to amplify the voices of Chinese queer and feminist artists with her colleagues. She coedits the publication Contemporary Queer Chinese Art.
Paul Gladston
Award-winning critical theorist and cultural historian Paul Gladston is the Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney and a distinguished affiliate fellow of the UK-China Humanities Alliance, Tsinghua University. He is co-editor of the book series Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics and was founding principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His recent publications include the collected edition Visual Culture Wars at the Borders of Contemporary China (2021) and the monograph Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an academic adviser to Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward Gallery, London (2012).
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Sahar Khraibani reading.
Sahar Khraibani
Sahar Khraibani is a writer, artist, and Associate Professor at Pratt Institute. Born and raised in Beirut, Sahar is currently based in Brooklyn, and writes about the intersection of art and geopolitics, cyber landscapes, desire, and the digital reproducibility of trauma. Sahar’s writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Project’s Footnotes, Hyperallergic, Al Hayya Magazine, FOMU’s Trigger, Nightboat Books, Bidayat Mag, and The Poetry Foundation, among many others, and is the recipient of the Montez Press Writer’s Grant (2020) and a fellowship from Asia Contemporary Art Week.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.