Symposium: 'Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions'

Schedule

Friday, May 19, 2023
9:30 a.m. Registration and Coffee
10 a.m. Symposium Begins
5 p.m. Keynote Presentation

See full schedule below.

Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2023 with our calendar of live events, recommendations, and on-demand content!

See the Calendar

Join Asia Society Texas for a symposium about the artists and issues featured in our current exhibition Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions.

Beginning with a guided gallery tour, guest curator Dr. Susan L. Beningson will lead a series of conversations with featured artists, including Bingyi, Cui Fei, Kelly Wang, Zheng Chongbin, and others, and joined by leading curators such as Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Dr. Zoe Kwok (Princeton University Museum of Art). Throughout this day of discussion, explore the breadth and depth of cultural, historical, and artistic themes on view in the exhibition as we rethink and reimagine the histories, traditions, and artistic practices of artists of Chinese and Chinese American descent.

This event is free and open to the public; registration required.

Symposium Details

9:30–10 a.m. Coffee and Registration

10 a.m. Summoning Memories Guided Tour with Guest Curator Dr. Susan L. Beningson

11:20 a.m. Welcome Remarks with Owen Duffy

Panel Discussion 1
11:30 a.m. "Nature: Oneness and Connectivity," Dr. Hiromi Kinoshita
12:15 p.m. "The Eyes of Chaos: Meditations on Ink Painting in the Taihang Mountains," Bingyi
12:45 p.m. Q&A with Hiromi Kinoshita and Bingyi

1–2 p.m. Lunch Break

Panel Discussion 2
2:05 p.m. "The Meaning of Materiality," Zheng Chongbin
2:45 p.m. Zheng Chongbin in conversation with Dr. Susan L. Beningson
3 p.m. Q&A with Zheng Chongbin and Dr. Susan L. Beningson

Panel Discussion 3
4 p.m. "Moving Past the Archive – Chinese Artists Looking Forward in the 21st Century," Dr. Zoe Kwok
4:40 p.m. Q&A with Dr. Zoe Kwok

Keynote
5 p.m. Conversation with Cui Fei, Zheng Chongbin, Kelly Wang, Bingyi, and Curators, moderated by Dr. Susan L. Beningson

About the Moderator

Susan L. Beningson is an independent curator based in New York City. She is currently teaching at New York University. Her next project will be a special exhibition of contemporary Chinese experimental ink painting in conjunction with Art Basel Hong Kong (March 2023). In 2020-2021 she curated the exhibition We The People: Xu Bing and Sun Xun Respond to the Declaration of Independence as part of the Asia Society Triennial (New York). From 2013 through 2019 she served as curator, Asian Art, at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial projects during this tenure included the exhibition One: Xu Bing and the reinstallation of the Arts of China galleries. She was a cocurator of the exhibition Infinite Blue and the reinstallation of the Arts of Korea galleries. Dr. Beningson was also responsible for the acquisition of more than fifty contemporary works of art for the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent Asian Art collection.

Previously, Dr. Beningson taught Asian and Islamic art history at the City University of New York, Rutgers University, and Columbia University and worked at Princeton University Art Museum. Her writings include contributions to Brooklyn Museum Highlights (2014), Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art (Asia Society Museum, 2010), and Providing for the Afterlife: “Brilliant Artifacts” from Shandong (China Institute, 2005), which accompanied an exhibition of the same title she co-organized in conjunction with the Shandong Provincial Museum. She has lectured and published widely on both contemporary and historical Asian art. Dr. Beningson received her Ph.D. in Chinese art and archaeology from Columbia University.

About the Speakers

Hiromi Kinoshita is the Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Curator of Chinese Art, and head of the department of East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prior to joining the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she was assistant curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Before that she was based in London and worked on two loan exhibitions — the Terracotta Army at the British Museum, and China: The Three Emperors (1662–1796), eighteenth-century imperial art treasures from the Beijing Palace Museum at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Her interest is in connecting general audiences with Chinese art. She published two highlight catalogues of Chinese collections from ancient to contemporary at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2012) and Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018). At Philadelphia, she led a team to develop an interactive for close-up viewing of the museum’s 15th century imperial coffered ceiling. In 2019 she reinstalled and reinterpreted the Chinese permanent galleries making the collection more accessible to general visitors. To continue the scope of the Chinese collection, she has been collecting and integrating contemporary works within the permanent galleries. Her current exhibition, Oneness: Nature and Connectivity in Chinese Art, features four contemporary artists whose practices expand out the idea of what nature is.

Zoe Song-Yi Kwok joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2013 and is the Nancy and Peter Lee Associate Curator of Asian Art. At the museum she oversees the collections of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Central Asian, and Islamic art.

In 2019 she curated the exhibition The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century that was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. Zoe also co-curated the 2015 exhibition Sacred Caves of the Silk Road: Ways of Knowing and Re-creating Dunhuang and oversaw the Princeton installation of the 2016 exhibition Epic Tales from India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art. She has also overseen numerous gallery installations, does research on the collections, makes acquisitions in Asian art, and occasionally teaches in the Department of Art & Archaeology.

Prior to her appointment at the Princeton University Art Museum, Zoe was an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She also has worked at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and received a Fulbright Fellowship (2007-2008) to study in China. Zoe received a B.A. from Wellesley College in history and art history, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and received her Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University in 2013.

Bingyi is an artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist. Adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective and channeling nature’s creative agency, her work is centrally concerned with the themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. After pursuing university-level studies in biomedical and electronic engineering in the United States, Bingyi earned a Ph.D. in Art History and Archeology from Yale University in 2005 with a dissertation on the art of the Han Dynasty.

Bingyi has exhibited internationally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021), the Brooklyn Museum (2019) the National Art Museum of China (2017), Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), Istanbul Modern (2016), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Alicante, Alicante, Spain (2014), St. Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Berlin, Germany (2012), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA (2010), Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels, Belgium (2009), Contrasts Gallery, Shanghai, China (2009), and Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA (2008). Her works have also been included in Surveyors, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA (2011), and Yipai, the Opening of the New Wing, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2009), and featured at The 7th Gwangju Biennale, Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, Gwangju, South Korea (2008).

Cui Fei was born in Jinan, China. She received her BFA in painting from China Academy of Fine Art and her MFA at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Museum of Arts and Design; Princeton University Art Museum; Queens Museum; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Museum Rietberg, Switzerland, and Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, among others.

She has received grants and awards, including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Socrates Sculpture Park Annual Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and Yishu, among other publications

Kelly Wang’s work examines and redefines Asian American identity, considering the emotionally complex and historically layered experiences of modern people. Her artistic practice incorporates her studies of East Asian aesthetics, art history, philosophy, science, mathematics and psychology. A descendent of the collector who amassed the celebrated Jade Studio collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy, Wang has been exposed to Chinese art since early childhood. She earned an MA in Art History from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from CUNY Hunter College. Kelly has been studying calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting since 2010 while developing her own contemporary artistic practice. She has lectured about Chinese art (traditional and modern) and Western abstract painting at CUNY Hunter College.

An intercultural and multidisciplinary artist, Wang combines contemporary and pre-modern materials and approaches to create paintings, sculptures, installations, and works that exist somewhere between two and three dimensions. Five of her works were acquired by Princeton University Art Museum, where she had a solo exhibition entitled Between Heartlands: Kelly Wang at Princeton's gallery project space, Art@Bainbridge, in 2022.

Zheng Chongbin, Born in Shanghai in 1961, Zheng graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou in 1984 and taught painting there until 1988. In 1989 he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement.

Zheng moves freely across a variety of media, a versatility that is highlighted in his large-scale light space installations I Look for the Sky, installed in the atrium of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and Liquid Space, that transformed the Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto in 2019, along with his immersive video pieces Material Play, shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2017, and Light and Space, “Wall of Skies” exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale 2016-17 in The Power Station of Art.

Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions is curated by Susan L. Beningson, Ph.D., Independent Curator, with the support of Owen Duffy, Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions, and Rebecca Becerra, Exhibitions Manager and Registrar. This program was made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Special support provided by Sundaram Tagore Gallery.

Exhibitions and their related programs at Asia Society Texas are presented by Nancy C. Allen, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, and Leslie and Brad Bucher. Major support comes from The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston Endowment, and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. Generous funding also provided by The Anchorage Foundation of Texas, The Clayton Fund, Texas Commission on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Wortham Foundation, Inc., Agnes Hsu-Tang, Ph.D. and Oscar L. Tang, and Ann Wales. Funding is also provided through contributions from the Exhibitions Patron Circle, a dedicated group of individuals and organizations committed to bringing exceptional visual art to Asia Society Texas.

Presenting Sponsors

Nancy C. Allen
Leslie and Brad Bucher
Chinhui Juhn and Edward Allen

Lead Sponsor

The Clayton Fund

Program Sponsors

Additional Support for Summoning Memories

About APAH Month at Asia Society Texas

Beginning in 2021, Asia Society Texas has celebrated Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with the Houston community and beyond through a curated calendar for 31 ways to celebrate over the 31 days of May. Spotlighting the traditions, talents, and contributions of Asians and Asian Americans, the calendar highlights the month's key Asia Society programming, providing a platform to showcase local artists, performers, educators, and leaders who contribute to the vibrant, multicultural tapestry of Houston while also featuring staff recommendations for our favorite music, books, movies, and more by Asian and Asian American creatives.

At Asia Society Texas, APAH Month is an opportunity to celebrate and honor Asians and Asian Americans and to uplift their stories to a broader audience as part of our goal to inspire our larger community to better understand one another through culture, conversation, and connection. For information about sponsoring APAH Month and other projects like this one, please contact Saleena Jafry at SJafry@asiasociety.org or 713.496.9939.

See the 2023 Calendar

Sponsors of APAH Month at Asia Society Texas

Asian American Bar Association of Houston
Comcast
The Heimbinder Family Foundation

Past APAH Month Calendars

2022: Highlights | Details
2021: Details

About Asia Society Texas

Asia Society Texas believes in the strength and beauty of diverse perspectives and people. As an educational institution, we advance cultural exchange by celebrating the vibrant diversity of Asia, inspiring empathy, and fostering a better understanding of our interconnected world. Spanning the fields of arts, business, culture, education, and policy, our programming is rooted in the educational and cultural development of our community — trusting in the power of art, dialogue, and ideas to combat bias and build a more inclusive society.