The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
ISSUE 16 2025
Curating Speculative Feminism
Curating Speculative Feminism
Speaking Nearby: A Letter on Ocean in Us—Southern Visions of Women Artists
Dear Reader,
I have spent a long time considering how to approach writing on the exhibition, Ocean in Us —Southern Visions of Women Artists (hereafter Ocean in Us). As a Taiwanese woman, a curator who had lived in Kaohsiung for several years, and a former staff member at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts—with some experience in Southeast Asian and Indigenous artistic practices—I might appear positioned at the threshold of being “able to speak” about this exhibition. Yet, every time I attempt to approach the exhibition from these identities, I become more conscious of my own limitations: women’s experiences are shaped by class, generation, and cultural context, and cannot be easily generalized; and even when Southeast Asia is invoked as a regional term, its internal complexity demands careful attention to the individual countries. Moreover, I did not participate in curating Ocean in Us; I only observed the development of the “South Plus: Constructing Historical Pluralism” trilogy over the past five years as a member of KMFA. I am close, yet do not fully belong; I understand certain contexts, yet cannot claim to represent another world; I have worked in the South, yet cannot claim to articulate what “the South” is in any complete sense.
This leaves me wondering: how much understanding is needed for one to feel “qualified” to comment?And if I feel uneasy adopting a panoramic view, might it be possible instead to approach the exhibition from a narrow opening—from a blind spot in my perspective—and engage in dialogue in a way that is partial yet sincere?
The concept of “speaking nearby”, articulated by Vietnamese American artist, filmmaker, and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, offers the orientation that feels most appropriate.1 To “speak nearby” is to refuse the traditional subject/object divide between the one who speaks and the one who is spoken about. It describes being close without substituting for or occupying the other. In other words, it rejects the stance of “I speak, I represent, I explain” in favor of a more humble, questioning relation—being present while maintaining distance, acknowledging difference, and leaving room for open interpretation.
Perhaps for this reason, I have chosen to respond to this exhibition in the form of a letter. I am not speaking from within it, but alongside it, allowing my language to unfold slowly. Let me, with my limitations and hesitations, approach you; and may you, from your own experiences, look back at the exhibition through these small openings.
The Multiple Contexts of “The South”
Before discussing Ocean in Us, I would like to briefly revisit the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts’ 2019 initiative, the “South Plus: Constructing Historical Pluralism” special collection. The first chapter, South as a Place of Gathering, traced the introduction of modern art during the Japanese colonial period, focusing on how artistic communities in southern Taiwan developed practices such as painting societies and sketching. The second chapter, South as a Place of Changes, confronted the industrial city of Kaohsiung under martial law, examining how artists responded to and resisted political pressure, as well as critiquing the pollution resulting from rapid industrialization.
Ocean in Us, as the third chapter, breaks from the previous two by foregrounding women artists instead of male-centered narratives. Moving beyond the focus on southern Taiwan and embracing the spirit of the “South Plus” concept, the exhibition can also be read in parallel with Taiwan’s recent New Southbound Policy and contemporary art discourse around the Global South. Beyond Taiwanese artists, the exhibition features participants from eight Southeast Asian countries: the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Cambodia. Drawing on the collections of KMFA alongside National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum, the exhibition is the product of a tri-institutional curatorial collaboration. The roster of works and artists is approximately equally drawn from Taiwan and Singapore, underscoring the curatorial team’s intention to cultivate a dynamic, reciprocal dialogue across regions.
This cross-contextual and trans-regional curatorial approach is perhaps also reflected in the exhibition’s title. The Chinese title, 珍珠 (“Pearl”), is inspired by the Chinese title of Elizabeth Pisani’s book Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation, which states “The Pearls that Gods Left Behind”, a reinterpretation by a Taiwanese publisher. The English title, Ocean in Us, draws on the concept of the Tongan scholar and poet Epeli Hauʻofa, who moves beyond the boundaries of islands and nations, proposing the ocean as a subject for thinking, thereby generating possibilities for transnational connection and solidarity. The divergence of titles does more than open multiple readings; it unfolds the exhibition into two realms: one, a tender, intimate world of named pearls; the other, a vast, flowing expanse of ocean. The exhibition thus weaves together these two sensibilities, a dialogue that continually stirs in the liminal spaces of language.
The term “pearl” carries an immediate sensibility: smooth, pure, round, lustrous, often associated with gentleness and femininity. Yet the formation of a pearl inherently involves pain—it is created as an oyster secretes layers of nacre in response to external irritation, a product of trauma and repair. Naming a women’s art exhibition, Pearl conveys both resistance and the possibility of mending, yet it inevitably invokes the imagination of suffering sublimated into beauty. It is indeed a fitting tribute to a generation of women artists, but how to further help audiences understand the historical context of these artists, and to resonate with contemporary women’s experiences, remains an open question.
Ocean in Us evokes an altogether different sensibility—fluidity, empathy, and collective interconnectedness. It reframes “the South” from a mere geographical notion into an epistemological position, akin to the hydrofeminist concepts increasingly cited in contemporary art, where oceanic connectivity and inclusivity intersect with women’s lived experiences. Yet if we return to Pisani’s depiction of Indonesia—“a ragbag of islands that had only a veneer of shared history, and little common culture”—we might extend this to the internal heterogeneity of East and Southeast Asia. “The South” is not a graspable totality; rather, it is a continuously shifting stance. It denotes geography, nation, and politics, yet also carries an affective summons—particularly in Taiwan, where the “South” is often romanticized as intimate and empathic. Yet even a tentative step closer immediately reveals the immense heterogeneity under a single name: multilingual realities, colonial histories, religious and cultural differences. In truth, we often know very little about the social and cultural structures of other Asian countries. Within the “South,” there are countless other “Souths,” a cacophony of voices and divergent narratives.
1 Chen, Nancy N. “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh–Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (March 1992): 82–91.
Polyphonic Gaps
Within the interwoven polyphonic currents of the South, I still sense certain works slipping through the gaps of language, resonating with one another. As Trinh T. Minh-ha observes, language is both a site of empowerment and a space of enslavement. The real antonym of the ‘poetic’ is the stereotyped.2 These works dismantle the walls of language while simultaneously constructing their own protective armor. The failures and fractures of language, its appropriation and transformation, resemble the breaking and reassembling of intact pearls: no longer smooth, yet refracting a more diverse spectrum of light.
Entering Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Unsubtitled (2010), the dimly lit gallery reveals over a dozen figures projected at life size onto wooden panels. They stand, eating their meals, then speak their names and the names of their food. Visitors can move among them, encountering these projected figures face to face. What seems like an ordinary, mundane scene in fact enacts a silent protest against the Vietnamese government’s censorship. The work premiered in 2010 during the reopening of the Nha San Studio in Hanoi, which had previously been forced to close due to nude performances by artists. Nguyen Trinh Thi invited the studio’s members to appear on camera, eating —“for eating needs no explanation.” Unlike social movements that often use fasting to draw attention, sacrificing the body to exert moral pressure, Unsubtitled presents quiet, silent nourishment as a form of resilient resistance when speech is constrained: a self-caring, energy-restoring act that is neither tragic nor sentimental.
2 ibid.
Where Unsubtitled expresses discontent with censorship through seemingly casual acts of chewing, Chng Seok Tin’s Man Eat Man (2005) reconstructs Lu Xun’s critique of traditional moral codes in Diary of a Madman with extreme irony. Chng reorganizes her 1996 calligraphy into an installation, transcribing key passages from Lu Xun:
I started leafing through a history book to look it up. There were no dates in the history, but scrawled this way and that across every page were the words BENEVOLENCE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, and MORALITY. Since I couldn’t get to sleep anyway, I read that history very carefully for most of the night, and finally I began to make out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase: EAT PEOPLE!3
The repeated characters ‘eat people’ densely covering the bottom of the composition materialize the paranoid visions depicted in Lu Xun’s writing. Yet Chng appends phrases never present in the original text, praising revolutionary ideals: “Freedom, democracy, a great and wise man, serving the nation…strategist of a thousand miles, bringing joy to the four seas.” Is the artist reinforcing Lu Xun’s foresight, or pointing to the emergence of another authority after the collapse of traditional culture and Confucian morality?
Suspended above the calligraphy are knotted bundles of dried lily buds (“kim chiam” in Mandarin, also known as “forget-worry grass”), a common nourishing ingredient in Chinese cuisine. Once knotted, they resemble human figures; anthropomorphized and manipulated as hanging objects, the theatrical stage set created by red curtains juxtaposes festive atmospheres with violent imagery, allowing the metaphor of “cannibalism” to hover between the everyday and the ritual. Chng’s black humor lightly transforms a cautionary text through familiar culinary materials: if people are to be eaten, then let a feast begin—devour these “human-shaped” kim chiam! The collage of these images returns Lu Xun’s urgent cry to everyday life: consuming others is not merely a historical metaphor but an ongoing phenomenon that permeates daily existence.
3 Lu, Xun. “Diary of a Madman.” Story. In Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, translated by William A. Lyell, 29–41. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii, 1990.
From Unsubtitled to Man Eat Man, artists enact resistance between silence and speech whereas Su-Chen Hung’s East/West (1984/1987) extends this resistance to the self-division and identity struggles experienced through transnational mobility. Inspired by her U.S. citizenship exam—when asked whether she would fight for America—Hong immediately realized: if war erupted between the U.S. and Taiwan, on which side could she stand? In the work, she embodies the fracture of language and identity by juxtaposing the left side of her lips speaking Chinese and the right side English, both translating and contending with one another. As Hong remarks in an interview, “The two lips never fully overlap, representing the fundamental differences between my place of origin and my adopted home.”4 Language becomes a medium of return, struggle, and loss; even before mastering a new language, she senses her mother tongue slowly receding. Names she knows best are transformed into strange forms to accommodate non-native speakers. Between Chinese and English, homeland and elsewhere, original self and adapted self, East/West reveals how identity wavers and flows with linguistic transition.
In contrast to Su-Chen Hung, who navigates displacement from Taiwan to abroad, Charwei Tsai’s Songs of the Migrant Workers of Kaohsiung Harbor (2018) and Wu Mali’s Tastes of Empire (2023) examine Taiwan as a receiving nation for foreigners arriving from various regions. Song and food become immediate embodiments of nostalgia. Songs of the Migrant Workers of Kaohsiung Harbor, the third installment of Tsai’s collaboration with Tibetan director Tsering Tashi Gyalthang in Songs We Carry, follows the previous works Songs of Chuchepati Camp (2017) recorded in Nepal and Hear Her Singing (2017) inviting women from a British refugee camp. At Kaohsiung Harbor, eight foreign fishermen perform songs from their hometowns as an expression of nostalgia as well as expressing the hardships of working abroad. Against the massive backdrop of ships, the figures appear small; one Indonesian fisherman, Malik Abdul Aziz, sings with a smile, “Working endlessly like a whipped horse,” a light melody masking deep hardship. The work undeniably offers these migrant workers a space to voice their feelings and longing for home, momentarily restoring their personhood beyond the state’s framework of “imported labor.” Yet this ethnographic mode of looking, paradoxically, risks reinscribing the very marginalization it seeks to address.
4 Gadaldi, Diana. “A Conversation with Su-Chen Hung: Resonances from the Past and a Look into Her Future Projects.” Droste Effect, January 20, 2014. https://www.drosteeffectmag.com/conversation-san-francisco-based-artist-su-chen-hung-resonances-past-look-upcoming-projects/. Accessed on Nov 18,2025.
Wu Mali’s Tastes of Empire originates from her 2016 project at the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art of Kaohsiung Normal University. She led students in transforming a section of Cijin’s former worker dormitory into a kitchen called “Cijin Kitchen,” proposing the concept of “Cijin’s Tongue.” Food becomes a means of understanding and engaging with place, later developing into the work Tastes of Empire. The project records interviews with six residents who migrated to Cijin at different times, their life trajectories reflecting geopolitical and social developments, including the retreat of Dachen people to Taiwan and the arrival of Southeast Asian migrant laborers. In addition to video documentation, the installation features red round tables commonly used in Taiwanese banquets, complemented by the participatory project What Is Taste? Stories of Food and Migration, inviting audiences to share their own food memories or recipes. Wu notes, “the tongue has a dual significance: for eating, taste, and food; and for speaking, language, and culture. Food itself is already a form of cultural expression.”5 As one of Taiwan’s pioneering figures in participatory art, Wu Mali’s practice has shifted from the confrontational and critical gestures of her early career to an emphasis on how art may leave the confines of the gallery and become a platform for dialogue and shared engagement.
Returning Inward
Up to this point, the exhibition unfolds step by step from silence, irony, translation, the Other, and food, toward a larger public narrative. From moving images to actions, from the politics of individual language to the polyphonic structures of groups. Yet, as I watch, I am suddenly drawn back “inward” by two intensely private works. Beyond the public sphere seems to lie a narrow fissure—where the artists’ youth, melancholy, desire, and mortality quietly reside.
Chen Yun’s Long Time No See (2012) marks her artistic debut. Having lost her mother early, she often spent her childhood alone amidst her father’s collection of old antiques, imagining that many friends resided within these objects, conversing and confiding with them. In Long Time No See, traditional funeral paper houses and figurines of boys and girls are transformed, decorated, paired with death records, and suspended within IKEA glass houses. The floating young figures appear both as spirits and as memories yet to be laid to rest. Chen writes a death story for each soul inhabiting the old objects, many drawn from her own life. The causes of death often seem trivial—one fall, a misunderstanding, a hurtful word; seemingly minor to an observer, yet potentially devastating to the individual. Other causes are absurd and chilling, as if to suggest that the path toward adulthood is strewn with hidden traps, any of which might extinguish a tender life. The youngest figure died at five, the oldest no more than twenty-three—the same age Chen Yun was when she received the Kaohsiung Award for this work.
5 National Sun Yat-sen University, Ministry of Education USR International Program “Urban Co-Working House.” City Co-Working House website. Accessed November 18, 2025. https://rallynsysu.wixsite.com/4rally-nsysu/kitchen.
In contrast to Chen Yun’s delicate, sensitive chronicle of youthful cruelty, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Reading Inaow for Female Corpse (Lament Series) (1997) approaches death and desire with a distilled, unwavering gaze.. In a dim space, a woman reads Thai literature Inaow, adapted from a Javanese legend, recounting the journey of a Thai prince in pursuit of love, before a glass coffin. The reading is gentle and intimate; viewers enter this semi-unsettling, semi-elegant performance through a headphone and a small screen, as if eavesdropping at the boundary of two worlds. The glass coffin transcends the limitations of a traditional wooden casket, presenting death and the body as if specimens for contemplation, allowing the corpse both to be gazed upon and to “receive” the text. Art historian Arnika Fuhrmann notes that Araya’s practice centers on an “idiom of negativity”6; she draws on Buddhist forms but rejects religious binaries of life/death or desire/detachment. In her work, death becomes an interlocutor of desire—it is not an endpoint but a site of tension, a field of attachment and longing. Reading Inaow for Female Corpse (Lament Series) signifies Araya’s series of works exploring corpses, challenging Thai social boundaries around women, desire, and mortality.
Writing Within the Cracks and Unease
Throughout these works, fragments of the quotidian and private murmurs persistently interweave. Acts of eating serve simultaneously as a protest against the nation and the system, and as a medium for transnational cultural exchange. Whether through self-confronting monologues or performative, externalized singing, the expression oscillates between the individual and the collective. The mouth emerges as an omnipresent metaphor—in silence or utterance, in speech or song, and in the sheer act of eating—sustaining life through postures of resistance or embrace.
I gradually realize that the works that hold my attention conceal a poetic violence: from state censorship and social oppression, to the push and pull of migrant identity, to the unattainable between life, death, and desire. Yet these artists navigate with a slippery, elastic stance, deftly manipulating or evading existing linguistic and narrative frameworks, from the minutiae of daily life to the enormity of death, subtle yet disquieting. I choose to regard this unease as a space of resistance—an interval that cannot be fully closed, a gap that cannot be directly translated or defined, existing in the disparities of language and the act of textual translation. Indeed, no matter what discursive framework I utilize to narrate these works, there always appears to be something left unsaid or incomplete.
“The story never stops beginning or ending. It appears headless and bottomless for it is built on differences. Its (in)finitude subverts every notion of completeness and its frame remains a non-totalizable one,” writes Trinh T. Minh-ha in Woman, Native, Other (1989). Understanding and knowledge should never be pursued as a fully closed totality; rather, they emerge from differences, fissures, and displacements, seeking those intervals that cannot be entirely possessed.
I do not know whether this writing can ever be fully grasped; perhaps it is already a kind of drifting—floating among the exhibition, the works, the languages, and the shifting idea of the South. I send this letter to you, hoping it may spark a small resonance. Perhaps you, too, will sense in your own cultural, linguistic, and historical landscapes the small ruptures, dislocations, and unease— where the possibility for dialogue emerges.
Written from the Margins of the South
—Yu-Ting
6 Fuhrmann, Arnika. “Making Contact: Contingency, Fantasy, and the Performance of Impossible Intimacies in the Video Art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook.” positions: asia critique 21, no. 4 (November 1, 2013): 769–99.
1 Chen, Nancy N. “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh–Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (March 1992): 82–91.
2 ibid.
3 Lu, Xun. “Diary of a Madman.” Story. In Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, translated by William A. Lyell, 29–41. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii, 1990.
4 Gadaldi, Diana. “A Conversation with Su-Chen Hung: Resonances from the Past and a Look into Her Future Projects.” Droste Effect, January 20, 2014. https://www.drosteeffectmag.com/conversation-san-francisco-based-artist-su-chen-hung-resonances-past-look-upcoming-projects/. Accessed on Nov 18,2025.
5 National Sun Yat-sen University, Ministry of Education USR International Program “Urban Co-Working House.” City Co-Working House website. Accessed November 18, 2025. https://rallynsysu.wixsite.com/4rally-nsysu/kitchen.
6 Fuhrmann, Arnika. “Making Contact: Contingency, Fantasy, and the Performance of Impossible Intimacies in the Video Art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook.” positions: asia critique 21, no. 4 (November 1, 2013): 769–99.
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Author
Tammy Yu-Ting Hsieh is a curator, editor, and researcher based in Taiwan. She has previously held positions in Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion, Hong-Gah Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. Her curatorial practice emerges in response to Taiwan’s contested geopolitical condition, critically engaging with postcolonial thought, border imaginaries, diasporic histories, and the ecological entanglements shaped by colonial legacies. Her recent research and curatorial practice trace the ecopolitics and extractive geographies of Asia and the Global South, attending to how landscapes are shaped—and scarred—by imperial legacies and uneven development. Recent curatorial projects include Technostalgia: Peripheral Memory (Ulaanbaatar Biennale, Ulaanbaatar, 2025) and Between Waves and Soils (Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2024–2025).
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