From July 10 – September 24, 2023, Tzu-Tung Lee (SMACT ’22) is in residence at Delfina Foundation.
Tzu-Tung Lee 李紫彤 (ze/zir) is a curator and conceptual artist whose practice combines anthropological field research, political concerns, and economic activism. Zir projects explore how one negotiates with political, gender, and illness identities. Tzu-Tung introduces participatory methods in zir projects, inviting participants as collective creators to queer up the contemporary authorities. Tzu-Tung’s works focus on how one can survive, manipulate, and regain autonomy through zir identities, with special attention on the hegemony of Chinese Sino-centrism, the trauma of modernity, the regain of indigeneity, and the current epistemological injustice.
During zir residency at Delfina Foundation, Tzu-Tung will use the time to develop playbooks that convert our approach to Taiwan’s probable warfare, asking that we artfully, creatively, and purposefully playfully rethink our most pressured political matters. As a Taiwanese political artist, Tzu-Tung has previously done economic activism projects and made an experimental documentary exploring various kinds of sovereignty issues.
On Wednesday, September 13, Tzu-Tung Lee and collaborators Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox will lead a workshop, Aesthetic Programming: Forking Workshop, at Delfina Foundation exploring the translation of code and software programs.
Through a series of workshops conducted with Tzu-Tung Lee in cities worldwide, authors Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox are endeavouring to collaboratively translate their open-access book Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (2020) into Chinese. Through this process they seek to engage with the politics of translation within the global Sinophone context.
Taking inspiration from the process in software development of “forking”, this intimate workshop seeks to fork Aesthetic Programming through discussion, translation, editing, and other creative means, incorporating situated knowledge and examples into the process.
The first “forking” workshop of the book was held in Taiwan in 2020 and focused on “problematic terms” in Chinese technology vocabulary translation. For example, should “coding” be translated as “編碼” (encoding), “編程” (programming), or simply “寫程式” (writing programs)? This second workshop, taking place at Delfina Foundation in London, will work through other glossaries, references, and examples in a global Sinophone context.
Tzu-Tung has an MSc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Zir artworks have been exhibited globally, including National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MOCA Taipei, C-Lab (TW), MIT Museum, Cuchifritos Gallery, Tom Robbinson Gallery (US), Lisbon University (PT), ArtScape(CA), Transemediale(DE), ADL(KR), Hyundai Studio(CN), among others. Politically, Tzu-Tung has organised monthly conferences at Café Philo Chicago (2016-2018), participated in NGO Overseas Taiwanese for Democracy, and edited the bilingual political magazine NewBloom. Ze is also the leader and visual designer for a rally of 200 people Anti-Black Box Education (2016), 40 cities wide rally Equality of Same-Sex Marriage (2016), and the organiser of the indigenous protest Passage of Time (2016). Furthermore, Tzu-Tung has curated serval cross-disciplinary events, ze is part of a panel committee for art and political roundtable in the 2017 North American Taiwan Study Association, served as the Jury Committee at Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, and the curator of art and anthropology biennale, Sensefield. Tzu-Tung is currently the founder of Tinyverse NPO, which facilitates transdisciplinary, collaborative art projects, and holds a series of hackathon for Artists events in Taiwan. Zir projects call attention to how to use participatory projects to pirate the current national property regime and so to release these commons to the public.
Tzu-Tung Lee was born and lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
