2025.04.26 Saturday 16:00
Location
MACA, 706 Beiyi St, 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Speaker: Liao Wen, Stephanie Sipei Lu
On the afternoon of April 26, MACA invites artist Liao Wen and researcher and writer Stephanie Sipei Lu for a conversation extending from the exhibition Liao Wen: Trust Fall. The two guests will share how they initiate activities—artistic creation and social practice—across different roles and fields.
In this exhibition, Liao Wen draws upon infrastructural elements commonly found in modern public spaces—such as turnstiles and stanchions—to guide visitors into making choices of either “compliance” or “transgression” in the exhibition space. Starting from her work, the artist will discuss the social contexts in which participatory installation art becomes effective, and to what extent an artist can shape or constrain the audience’s actions.
Stephanie Sipei Lu will respond to themes in Liao Wen’s work such as “boundaries,” “participation,” and “symbolic body,” while also reflecting on her own public practices in Guangzhou. Drawing from her experiences as a researcher, curator, collaborator, institutional and independent practitioner, and educator, she will share her understanding of “publicness” and her approach to perceiving “the live field.”
This conversation will be an open discussion on boundaries, the relationship between self and others, bodily engagement, and reflections on social practice.
Liao Wen lives and works in Hong Kong. She received her MFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Liao Wen's practice spans sculpture, performance, and video. Drawing inspiration from puppetry, anthropology of myths and rituals, medicine, and art history, she interrogates the social order, technology, and disciplining power projected onto the body. Both primordial and futuristic, her works depict the unsettling balance of the body in the liminal state and imagine future bodily possibilities. She has held solo exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai (Venice, 2024; Shanghai, 2021) and Cai Jin Space (Beijing, 2021). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou, 2024); The First Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial (Guangzhou, 2023); Cassina Projects (Milan, 2023); François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, 2022); OCAT Biennale 2021 (Shenzhen, 2021), among others. She was awarded the Frieze New York Stand prize in 2023 and was a finalist artist for the Ducato Prize in 2023. Her works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, The Art Newspaper China, and ArtReview. She has been selected to be the resident of Pro Helvetia in Switzerland in 2025.
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Stephanie Sipei Lu is a writer, researcher, and curator focusing on socially engaged art and the publicness of art institutions. She holds a PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and is a faculty member at the Research Centre for New Art Museum Studies, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Her writings have appeared in Qilu Criticism, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of the British Academy, The Future of Museum and Gallery Design, Meishu, Museum Worlds, Be Water Journal, among others. Sipei is the translator of Active Withdrawals: Life and Death of Institutional Critique. She is the main author of ecoartasia.net, part of her post-doc project on art and ecology at City University of Hong Kong (2019-2020). Sipei is an editor for Museum & Society journal and leads a publication project on socially engaged art in South China. Sipei initiated ‘Threading through The Eye of the Needle’ (2021- ), an exhibition as part of the First Trans-Southeast Asia Biennial, and developed it into a long-term curatorial project involving exhibitions, publications, screenings, and workshops to facilitate exchanges and create projects with/for social practice practitioners. Sipei also serves as a consultant for local foundations in Guangdong on their research, residency, and funding programs in relation to social practice. Sipei is also a member of Wanwu Practice Group.
