Para Site is pleased to present a conversation between Gong Jow Jiun, curator and art critic, and Simon Soon, art historian and curator of Towards A Mystical Reality, part of the exhibition Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs. They will discuss the role of vernacular religious art and folk culture as forms of parallel cultural production, outside of colonially framed modern narratives on politics, economics, and aesthetics. Gong’s talk will depart from the recent exhibition Kau-Pué, Mutual Companionship in Near Future, part of the long term research in Taiwan on the knowledge of “Kau-pué realms”, self-organised social systems that can be traced to civil society during the Qing dynasty. In the exhibition that included contemporary and folk artists, Gong and the curatorial team identified a vernacular genealogy as an alternative narration to the linear art history of Taiwanese modernism as well as to the established narratives on politics, religion, indigenous identity, and history of folklore. Simon Soon will present his research on Datok Fatimah, a house temple in Klang that offers a transhistorical and transcultural bond between two migrant working class communities in this Malaysian port city across the twentieth century.
