My
Art Practice

A Short History of the Modern Plagues

Single-channel video, color, sound
15 Minutes 30 Seconds
2022

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A Short History of the Modern Plagues is an essay film. It is to be noted, however, that it is not a historical chronology of contagious diseases. In this work, just like a leaf unfolding all the wealth of the empirical world of plants, plagues are more like a narrow door to a wide historical space. Through the mediation of a large number of archives from different periods of the 20th century, the work unlocks fragmented memories of plagues in modern China. These memories are directed in different directions around the theme of the plagues, converging into a constellation of historical images of the health care system, the modern nation-state, colonialism, enlightenment and salvation, tradition and progress, Socialist experiments, and many other issues.

Photographic Moments: The Emergence of Photographic Visuality in China

Co-curator

2022

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Hosted by Xie Zilong Photography Museum (abbr. XPM), “Photographic Moments: The Emergence of Photographic Visuality in China” concerns the world beyond the frozen images of photographs in the early period in China. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Tang Hongfeng, the Research Fellow and Dean of the Department of Art Theory at the School of Arts, Peking University, with Yang Yunchang, Zheng Zihan, Li Hui, Luo Yueqin as co-curators. In this exhibition, “photography” is interpreted as the whole process of image production, circulation, and application. By introducing the research methodology of visual cultural studies, it discusses the coexistence between photography and miscellaneous visual media at the time, which created a synthesised experience for the Chinese.