MODULE: DREAM SEQUENCE #88 (Sea of Love)

South by Southeast: A Further Surface

Common is the notion that the south lies at the opposite of north and that the north is supposedly ascendant, more prone to power, and closer to the imagined center. The south is cast as the peripheral and the dispossessed and that it gathers at the perceived fringes of provinces on a map of asymmetries. Such a curious psycho-geographical, or geopolitical, imagination yields another antinomy: the west and the east, bearing more or less equivalent valences as north and south. This procedure of organizing the world reduces the latter into polarities and verticalities, the west is modern and everywhere yet the east is timeless and afar. The situation where the south and the east cohere to form the coordinate of the southeast is exceptional. It is possibly a double negation: not north, not west. And as such, it is a productive locus: it is not the center, twice.

Commencing from a specific geography and a state of mind to generate a certain way of observing and understanding locality, the exhibition discusses the spectral idea of artistic initiative through the lens of materiality and reciprocity as poignant and also resolute stances. The body of works presented in the exhibition centers on the “Southeast” as a trope to understand the world today.

The exhibition extends the original concept of South by Southeast held in Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong in March 2015 by the invitation of Guangdong Times Museum. It is a gesture of the Times Museum to trace its location to Southeastern China and to take part in mediating the imageries and geopolitical implications of the “Southeast” that were brought to the fore in the first part of the exhibition. Artists from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe are convened to create an experience and a climate that evoke the structure of the Southeast.

Co-curated by Patrick D. Flores (The Philippines) and Anca Verona Mihuleţ(Romania) 

2016 /  Guangdong Times Museum / China