This winter, Collective presents a new exhibition by artist-curator Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡 as part of the Satellites Programme.
neither the West nor the East can be a determinate location is a multisensory installation featuring text, handmade paper, found objects, scent, ceramic sculptures and silver casts. To create this new series, Katherine has developed an engaged approach to archival research, in which they interrogate and challenge the Western, Eurocentric frameworks that have been imposed on Hong Kong (a British colony from 1841-1997).
This exhibition has been informed by research into the geographic and historic coordinates of Collective’s site on Calton Hill, that rests across a meridian line. In European theory, the meridian is conceived as an imaginary circle on the Earth's surface, from the North to the South Pole. In contrast, the meridian system in traditional Chinese medicines is called ‘Channel Network’, a concept of a path through which the life-energy known as "qi" flows. The meridian runs through the Hillside Gallery, where Katherine’s work will be exhibited, and continues across the globe towards the Hong Kong Observatory (est 1883).
Katherine’s practice spans across writing, curating, sculptural installation, poetic manifestation, sound, performance, and video. This installation will be a space for reflection, encouraging visitors to reclaim strength and charge resilience.
Katherine also commissioned a new text by Wei Zhang 喂张, as an accompaniment to the exhibition. Zhang presents narrative poetry that beds deep into mythologies of coloniality, and relations between the body and the earth.
Wei Zhang (b. 1991, China) migrated to Glasgow, Scotland, where they have lived for seven years. Zhang is a filmmaker and visual artist working between moving image, performance, and installation. Fascinated with collage, Zhang blends mixed-media materials or footage to create a surreal space where queer, body, family, and trauma intertwine.
Interpretation material can be viewed here, and Zhang's text can be viewed here.
Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡 is an artist-curator whose practice and research became witness to the political transformation in Hong Kong from a British colony to a post-colonial state. Their work lingers in between conversations of self and collective healing, contemplates notions of the cultural, socio-political, socio-linguistic construction of diasporic identities, and confronts the politics of power, gender(s), and race with a humorous touch. They are a former committee member at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2018-22) and guest curated group exhibition breathe, spirit and life 呼吸、靈魂與生命 at Bluecoat, Liverpool 2022.
Satellites Programme is Collective’s development programme for emergent practitioners based in Scotland. Satellites aims to support diverse practitioners to produce a new commission and includes a critical development programme of retreats, workshops, studio visits and group discussions, public exhibitions, events and publishing. Practitioners are selected from an open submission by a new panel each year. The 2021/22 participants are Stephanie Black-Daniels, Mina Heydari-Waite, Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡, Joey Simons and Camara Taylor.