Announcement
LIBRARIANS-IN-RESIDENCE 2023
Asymmetry HQ
102a Albion Drive, London E8 4LY
Image courtesy of Asymmetry Art Foundation
We are pleased to announce our brand-new Librarians-in-Residence series, with the inaugural edition commencing this spring. Grounded in the physical library space at Asymmetry HQ in East London, the Librarians-in-Residence program will seek to expand Asymmetry’s library in ways that further engage the Sinophone community in London and internationally.
In the six-month residency running from March to September 2023, our inaugural librarians, London-based writer-curator Alvin Li and New York-based artist-educator Chang Yuchen, will engage the multivalent practices of the library through a series of public programmes, spanning the collection, reading, discussion, publication, and community of printed matters and thoughts. Together they seek to investigate the social, economic, affective and political dimensions of the library—at once a space of knowledge acquisition, public gathering, and private contemplation.
With Alvin running the project in London and Yuchen corresponding from New York, the inaugural Librarians-in-Residence program will engender activities of different natures, responding to an expansive and myriad conception of what the library is and could be. Monthly acquisitions will add to Asymmetry’s library collection by reconsidering and articulating acquisition strategies and themes that acknowledge concerns of authorship, knowledge production, value, and circulation. The librarians will also engage in collaborative publishing as a countermovement and response to the addition of the collection, delighting in the possibilities of marginalia, ephemera, reviews, amongst others. Conceiving the Library as a public and social space for gathering and exchange, the Librarians will organise in-person reading groups and talks that bring together an evolving community of guest speakers, writers and readers.
More details on the first cycle of events to be announced shortly in the Librarians' monthly newsletter.
BIOGRAPHY
Alvin Li is a writer and curator based in London, where he is Adjunct Curator, Greater China, supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, at Tate. He has served as Contributing Editor of frieze magazine since 2018, and was Artistic Advisor of the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2022. His writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in international publications such as frieze, Artforum, e-flux and e-flux Architecture, Mousse, Spike Art Quarterly, and ArtReview Asia, as well as in catalogues and anthologies published by the New Museum, New York; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Dancing Foxes Press; and Sternberg Press, among others. In 2021, his year-long research on Uyghur rap as seen through the lens of China’s changing language and ethnic policies was published in The Contest of the Fruits (MIT Press, 2021) edited by Guangtian Ha and Slavs and Tatars.
As a fiction writer, he has featured in Spike Art Quarterly and held readings at the Cell Project Space in London in 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2020 and at the CURRENT: LA Public Art Triennial in 2019.
Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner – writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. By constantly entering and exiting each medium, Chang strolls against the category of things and the labour division amongst people. Chang was a recipient of Kahn | Mason SIP Fellowship, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award Grand Jury Prize, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant and Lumiarts Fellowship. Her work has been shown/performed at UCCA Dune, Power Station of Art, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary, Artists Space, Abrons Art Center and more. She was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, NARS x Governors Island, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Textile Arts Center. Chang has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, Randian, and currently lectures at Yale University, University of the Arts, Center for Book Arts and Printed Matter, amongst others.