2025.09.18 Thursday 19:30
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Artist：Wang Ziyue
The concept of lecture performance invites diverse interpretations across different fields and practical contexts. Yet, discussions of such works often converge on two core questions: their essence—What is a lecture performance?—and their motivation—Why a lecture performance? More specifically, reflecting on lecture performance involves addressing multi-dimensional inquiries such as: How do lecture performances and educational contexts shape each other? How can a balance be struck between narrative strategies and artistic expression? In what ways can creative mediums respond nimbly to social issues? Where are the boundaries between artistic creation and public participation? And how can lecture performances foster critical awareness and democratize knowledge production?
These questions are deeply embedded in ongoing intellectual debates about how contemporary art practices and public activities generate social and cultural impact. With these concerns in mind, I aim to articulate my own reflections as an art practitioner engaged in processes of transformation and the reconstruction of publicity. This lecture performance, the inaugural event of the series, will explore and engage with the questions above through ten specific case studies. Similar questions have recurred throughout art history, and past experiences continue to provide important points of reference—within these echoes, we attempt to seek contemporary answers.
Wang Ziyue (b.1988)
Artist, theater director, founder of CapsuleMall. She has always been focusing on the human condition with her multi-faceted artistic practice, exploring current social realities and human existence in sequences including performance, video, installation, painting and social artworks.
She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and projects, including “The Things Streaming” (OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen, 2022), “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always” (A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, 2020), “The Six Day” (Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, 2019), “Novel of Poem” (Kyoto Art Center, Japan, 2018), “Broken Idols” (FM Art Space, Guangzhou, 2016), and so on. She was invited to participate in numerous group exhibitions, including the 22nd China Shanghai International Arts Festival, “2019 The Bi-city Biennale Of Urbanism/Architecture”, “The 10th Shanghai Biennale”, “The 3rd China Xinjiang International Art Biennial” and “Reecho·MingYuan ZhongShan Park Project of 9th Shanghai Biennale”.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
