Survival as Care in HK Art @ AGNSW, 29 Oct 6pm (Sydney Asian Art Series)
Olivier Krischer
Wednesday, 29 October 2025
6:00PM - 7:30PM (AEST)
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Register: https://www.powerinstitute.org.au/events/survival-care-hong-kong-art
Dr Yeewan Koon: "Survival as Care in Hong Kong Art"
We often frame art through value systems, evaluating social significance, exchangeability, and cultural worth. Yet, an underlying anxiety persists regarding the temporal limits of these values, as we are perpetually measured by outcome-based results. Escaping these evaluative structures seems nearly impossible. Nearly.
In recent years, in small pockets of Hong Kong, artists are embracing care as a mode of practice, which can vary from the ad hoc to the carefully considered. Despite their varied methods, these collectives and individuals converge on a shared interest of placing survival at the intersection of art and community. Their projects emphasize the critical need for an ethics of voice and relationships that can generate healing for everyone involved. For some artists and their collaborators, what care is able to offer is a counterbalance to the structures of values imposed by political bureaucracy, capitalism and a digital economy. This paper presents artists who work with neurodiverse children, nature and community, and minimum wage labor workers, to examine the underpinnings of care as survival. Of interest is how their work overturns the idea of the body as a biopolitical agent with limited values, to a biological body within cycles of nature, and where intimate, daily, ritualistic methods realign not only social relations but also concepts of time and histories.
Dr Yeewan Koon is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong. She has published numerous works including Nara Yoshitomo(2020), “A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art (2019) and A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in 19th Century Guangdong (2014). She is the recipient of several research awards including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Scholars, and visiting scholarships at Cambridge University and Columbia University. Koon also works in the contemporary art field as a critic and curator. In 2014, she was guest curator of It Begins with Metamorphosis: Xu Bing at the Asia Society, Hong Kong Centre, and was one of the selected curators for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. In June 2021, she curated the exhibition So long, thanks again for the fish!, which was part of the Inspired Programme of inaugural Helsinki Biennale in Finland.
Held at the Art Gallery of NSW, this is free and public, and is the final lecture in 2025 Sydney Asian Art Series, themed ‘Cūra: Care’, convened by Olivier Krischer (UNSW) and Peyvand Firouzeh (University of Sydney). Established in 2017, the series is co-presented by the Power Institute and the Art Gallery of NSW, with the support of VisAsia.