Unidentified Acts of Design
VIEW EVENT DETAILSEvening Lecture with BRENDAN CORMIER and LUISA MENGONI, Project Curators and MARISA YIU, Founding Partner of ESKYIU (Moderator)
Registration 6:15pm;
Presentation 6:30pm;
Cocktails 7:30pm
Unidentified Acts of Design is an exhibition and research project developed by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and presented at the Urbanism\Architecture Bi-city Biennale (UABB) 2015 in Shekou, Shenzhen. It looks at the recent past of the Pearl River Delta to seek out innovative acts of design that have occurred or are emerging outside the conventional studio context. The development of this projects fall within the remit of a wider collaboration between the V&A and China Merchants Shekou Holdings to establish Design Society, a new cultural hub in Shenzhen. Through design, Design Society will encourage dialogues and collaborations to reveal how design can be a catalytic social force.
This research project is supported by a grant from Design Trust, a not-for-profit that advocates for the positive value of the process of design, debate and creative sharing. Design Trust creates long-term meaningful platforms to fund projects that develop expertise, build research initiatives and content related to Hong Kong and the Greater Pearl River Delta region. Project curators, Brendan Cormier and Luisa Mengoni will be introducing this project in Hong Kong at this free-to-attend public lecture.
Brendan Cormier is the lead curator of 20th and 21st century design for the Shekou Project at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is responsible for curating the V&A Gallery, Shekou, featuring objects of international design from the V&A collection, due to open in 2017 at Design Society. Prior to this he was the managing editor of Volume magazine, an Amsterdam-based quarterly on architecture and urbanism. In 2014 he curated Tortona Stories, an exhibition about production in the Italian countryside, which was featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as serving as Assistant Curator for the first ever Iranian Pavilion at the same Biennale.
Luisa E. Mengoni, formerly Curator of Chinese Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is currently on a three-year secondment in Shenzhen as Head of the V&A Gallery, Shekou. Her role is to supervise the V&A’s collaboration with China Merchants Shekou (CMSK) to support the establishment of Design Society, while developing networks of creative professionals, educators and local communities in China. Back in London she contributed to major V&A gallery and exhibition projects. She is currently interested in the new developments of Chinese design and crafts, from education to design practices and innovative solutions, and in the emergence of new museum models - private and public - in China.
Marisa Yiu is an architect and Founding Partner of ESKYIU, a multi- disciplinary architecture studio actively integrating culture, community, art and technology based in Hong Kong. She was the Chief Curator of the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture located at the West Kowloon waterfront; and recently curated Studio-X Shenzhen at the Value Factory. Along with her partner Eric Schuldenfrei, they were awarded the ‘Architectural League Prize’ for their installations featured in the Venice Biennale and New York’s Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They edited,INSTANT CULTURE: Architecture and Urbanism as a Collective Process and co-authored “Unitary Urbanism” in the book,High-Rise – Idea and Reality.
Yiu’s work and writings have been published in A/D, Domus China, MIT’s thresholds, and Architectural Record among others. She has spoken at numerous global platforms including TEDxCUHK, UNESCO forum and at Harvard’s AsiaGSD conference. She has taught at London’s Architectural Association, Parsons, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, School of Architecture at CUHK among others. Yiu is an AIA member, HKIA associate, Board of Advisors for RTHK, and Board member of the Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design // Design Trust. (Moderator)
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Event Details
Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty