Guest curated and moderated by Venus Lau
Steph Huang, Artist, London
Shuang Li, Artist, Berlin/Wuyi
Joshua Serafin, artist, Philippines/Belgium
Moderator: Venus Lau, Director, Museum MACAN Jakarta
Fluidity, as a metaphor for culture and politics, is seldom linear, transparent, or homogeneous. It moves unevenly through friction and turbulence – marked by continual acceleration, deceleration, deviation, and accumulation. This conversation brought together artists Steph Huang, Shuang Li, and Joshua Serafin to discuss the complex fluxes of commodities, symbols, images, bodies, and spaces within their artistic practices and research. Rethinking how the slippery boundaries of cultural systems are generated under conditions of instability, the panel focused on the moments of blockage and dislocation that emerge as flows traverse corporeal, cultural, and visual borders – and how these frictions reshape rhythms, memory, and spatial relations.
Steph Huang is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of labor, food, and mass production through the cultural biographies of everyday objects and spaces. She transforms mundane materials into minimalist yet poetically resonant installations. Her work uncovers the historical and transcultural narratives embedded within consumer culture while critically examining its environmental and human costs. By merging the handmade with the readymade, Huang illuminates the surreal contradictions of capitalism and invites viewers to reexamine their relationship to consumption.
Shuang Li lives and works in Berlin and Wuyi. She earned an MA in Media Studies from New York University (2014). Working across performance, interactive websites, sculpture, and moving images, her practice examines the media that compose the contemporary digital landscape, the material lives that support it, and more importantly, the cracks in between.
Joshua Serafin is a multidisciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines, they are currently based in Brussels. They are also a house artist of Viernulvier from 2023 to 2027. Serafin’s work deals with questions of identity, transmigration, Queer politics and representation, states of being, and ways of inhabiting the body. Their body of work creates new forms of ritual and embodiment, based on Queer ecologies.
Venus Lau is the director of Museum MACAN in Jakarta. Prior to this, Lau was the art strategic director for Modern (Meta) Media Group after serving as the artistic director at K11 Art Foundation (KAF). For the latter role, she oversaw the foundation’s artistic programming, including German artist Katharina Grosse’s first solo exhibition in China, ‘Mumbling Mud’. Before joining KAF, Lau was the artistic director of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen.
Stage furniture by Porro and B&B Italia, courtesy of Salone del Mobile.Milano
#Conversations #Aqueous #borders #Rethinking #fluidity