Between 1994 and 1995, Chinese artist Xu Bing carried out three performances. The Cultured Animal and A Case Study of Transference took place in a Beijing gallery space, and A Case Study of Transference 2 took place in a pig farm. The performance stages two pigs, one painted with nonsensical English and the other with meaningless Chinese characters, copulating before a live audience. The work was later censored in New York, where it had been included in Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, the largest contemporary Chinese art survey to date held at the Guggenheim Museum in 2017. It has variously been described as a literal metaphor for “cultural rape,” an intervention in East meets West binary politics, New Ink Art, and a rather particular approach to non-human actors. The violence enacted on lived experience through the governance by pigs takes on another meaning in the Sinosphere, where lifelines are punctuated by the 38-year long Martial Law in Taiwan beginning in 1949, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, and now the Be Water Revolution of 2019 in Hong Kong—the last taking place in the year of the pig in the lunar cycle. The following is a selection of work forged in fire, about and in the times of insurgent repression.

Hera Chan is not to be confused with Miss Hong Kong 2018. Currently, she is Adjunct Curator of Greater China, Supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for Tate and is a participant of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme. In Hong Kong, she was associate curator of public programmes at Tai Kwun Contemporary, director/ curator of Videotage, and researcher at the SEACHINA Institute, where she focused on socially engaged art practices in contemporary China. She co-founded Atelier Céladon in Montreal. Hera has staged exhibitions and public programmes at Para Site and Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, UCCA Beijing, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and spaces like articule, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, and Studio XX in Montreal. In 2017, she co-founded Miss Ruthless International, a contemporary art network that mimics the infrastructure of diasporic beauty pageants.