Exploding and Netting: A Somatic Archive of Transpacific Movement
This exhibition runs Monday, September 23, 2024 through Friday, December 6, 2024
Wesleyan University and other New England academic institutions have been immersed in transpacific interactions with China since their foundations. What does it mean to travel, to be forced to travel, or hold potential movements between China and New England and vice versa? How do such memories, legacy, and violence flow in Wesleyan’s archives, architecture, and bodies of past and present students? Exploding and Netting: A Somatic Archive of Transpacific Movement grapples with Wesleyan’s and other institutions' involvement with China from the nineteenth century to the present through archives that leave traces of this interaction. Sensing the textual, architectural, and bodily archives via the perspectives and experiences of current Chinese international students, this exhibition presents mixed-media artworks by Loren Yuehan Wang ’25 to respond to the institutional history of transpacific travel by transgressing and solidifying identities.
The exhibition was curated by Yijing Lai ’24 and Xiran Tan ’24 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies.
Read more in the Wesleyan Connection.
GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday through Friday, Noon to 4pm
College of East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University
Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies
343 Washington Terrace, Middletown CT 06457
860-685-2330
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Image: Loren Yuehan Wang, A Cross-Pacific Effect (expert), 2022, print on paper, 15.7 x 23.6 inches, courtesy of the artist.