Held at Goethe-Institut, China in Beijing on 24 July 2026, the forum was organised by INK Institute, New York, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, China. Robin Mallick, Director of Goethe-Institut, China, delivered the welcome remarks. Nataline Colonnello and Craig L. Yee co-curated, co-organised and co-moderated the event.
The panel brought, Chinese artist, Wang Shaoqiang's shūxiě practice into dialogue with Hanne Lippard's work at the confluence of spoken and written language. Their practices opened onto philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, comparative philosophy, translation and contemporary art criticism. Heidegger's account of the artwork as an event of disclosure and Gadamer's conception of historically situated understanding provided one set of coordinates; materiality, embodiment, multilingualism, media and artistic institutions remained equally central.
Body, Material and Shūxiě
Using a PowerPoint presentation, Wang introduced a range of his works through the idea of a "topology of writing." Brush, ink and xuan paper participate in the production of meaning: speed, pressure, turns and pauses enter the image, making writing a process jointly produced by bodily movement, material response and textual understanding. In his response, Yee distinguished shūfǎ from shūxiě. The former invokes copying, rules and historical styles; the latter foregrounds the act of writing and the writer's reworking of a source text.
In A Thousand Characters (2023), Wang brings the Thousand Character Classic together with translation, research and repeated inscription, retaining corrections, misreadings and AI-generated mistranslations. He described this sustained labour as a "digestion" of the text: reading begins with another person's words, while writing draws the reader into the text's operation as a participant in the production of meaning. Classical texts, different scripts and distinct intellectual histories thereby enter visual, material and bodily relation.
Voice, Duration and Unstable Language
Lippard first introduced her artistic practice across performance, sound installation and text. She approached language as material shaped by voice, breath, rhythm, repetition, duration and space, and described the distinct perceptual relations produced by live vocal performance and loudspeaker installation. A live performance unfolds through the artist's bodily presence, the immediacy of voicing and the attention generated between performer and audience. In an installation, the recorded voice is detached from the speaker's present body and reorganised through loudspeakers, architecture, loops and spatial distribution; the audience encounters the work through movement, pauses and repeated listening.
As an example, she introduced the conceptual framework of Passive/Active, which can be presented as a live performance or as a sound installation through loudspeakers. Beginning with the technical distinction between passive and active loudspeakers, the work uses the multiple meanings of words such as speaker and enceinte to connect loudspeaker, human body, enclosure and energy, asking how agency depends on other bodies, devices and social relations. Lippard also discussed Anonymities, developed through repeatedly practising a difficult word until mispronunciation became rhythm and melody. Error thereby entered the work's formation as material. At the end of her presentation, Lippard performed Passive/Active in full for the audience, enacting its conceptual structure through voice, body and duration.
From Artistic Practice to Debate
The round table extended the artists' specific practices into intersecting questions of rhythm, repetition, authority, embodiment and interpretation. Daniel Muzyczuk used "soft authority" to describe the calm yet regulating register of manuals, call centres and public announcements, asking who speaks in Lippard's performance: the artist, the quoted text, an institution or a device? Passing through breath, microphone and loudspeaker, voice becomes embodied while also separating from its speaker. Rhythm thus became one productive line of comparison between the two practices.
Approaching the works through comparative philosophy, Yi Chen argued that repetition gives personal rhythm to orthodox or impersonal language. She described Wang's layered writing as a movement from "text to texture" and connected Lippard's active/passive distinction with wúwéi: action may exceed the sovereign subject's full control, while understanding also encompasses experience beyond conceptual explanation. Jiang Jun compared the communal forms of the Chinese literati gathering and Western modern art through sociology and institutional history. Referring to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, he considered image, memory and cultural association, and contrasted resonance with critique and estrangement. Chen observed that critique may also mean examination and inquiry, cautioning against turning these terms into a cultural opposition between China and the West.
Yee shifted the discussion towards fragments and philosophical expression. Meaning may arise between fragments, while the selection and rearrangement of texts invites viewers to construct relations among them. Reflecting on Lippard's performance, he described listeners as suspended between active and passive: following language while being carried by its pace and density. Lippard replied that language moves like a current through the performer and then through the listener's body. By withholding a printed script during the event, she allowed listening to precede reading.
Understanding Beyond Decoding
An audience question turned the discussion towards whether art must provide definite answers. Muzyczuk argued that treating understanding as the single key to an artwork would exhaust the reason to revisit it once it had been decoded. Chen proposed that understanding includes listening and even temporary non-understanding, and that the relationship between artwork and viewer changes over time. Lippard likewise resisted a single prescribed reading: by disassembling and recombining everyday language, she allows it to become unfamiliar again. Yee invoked the Chinese terms tǐyàn and tǐwù to describe the bodily dimension of an encounter with art; Chen added that embodiment has also been central to Western philosophy since Merleau-Ponty and may be considered alongside the bodily dimension of self-cultivation in Chinese thought.
An Open Conclusion
The forum drew its critical force from the convergence of distinct artistic and philosophical operations. Repeated inscription, translation and AI-generated mistranslation in Wang's work, together with live voicing, recorded mediation, loudspeakers, architecture and audience in Lippard's practice, located interpretation within acts of continual transformation. Meaning emerged through material decisions, temporal structures, technical mediations and specific encounters, acquiring new material and historical conditions at each passage between texts, languages, bodies and media.
The exchange sustained a plural field of inquiry in which different cultural histories, philosophical traditions and artistic media retained their specificity while entering into relation. Its central proposition concerned how artworks carry, alter and generate worlds of meaning. Interpretation emerged as a situated, generative and continually unfolding process, shaped by knowledge, material and medial difference, historical asymmetry and the productive interval opened by temporary non-understanding.
