About Project

Wandering Scholars is an interdisciplinary symposium about contemporary culture, art, media and scholarship that focuses on acts of “walking” and “wandering” as strategies of thought and expression. It will consider the importance of processes of walking, elements of distraction, chaos, non-productivity, non-linearity and “failure”, as well as the fascination of a peripatetic way of disseminating knowledge. Whether we are making solitary journeys or moving in groups, we are constantly drifting and perceiving with five senses, or using technological devices, while sensing the rhythms and languages constituted by spaces, times and people. The symposium invites artists, scholars and audiences to develop participatory modes of education as acts of walking.

Journeys into sex art and knowledge will be shown and discussed at a “Long Table”**.

At 1pm the event will open with an appetizer and sparkling beverage. Next we will witness a performance art piece by Tobaron Waxman entitled The 71st Face . It is an cappella endurance performance for the transsexual voice that will
resonate with the cattle depot’s architecture. More specifically he will sing songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic about death and transformation.

At 2:30 pm there will be an intermission around the table with informal table chat and Dimsum.

At 3:15 pm the floor goes to filmmaker Fan Popo who will present a talk and movie segments entitled Queer Mobility and Home Sickness. As he describes:” My ’identity trouble’ is not merely limited to sexuality; it is also about me as a filmmaker, a curator, an activist, a writer (sometimes).­ It is cool to engage in a variety of tasks within multiple fields, but this can be exhausting as well; traveling around brings me as much excitement as homesickness.

The program will conclude at 5pm with a dialogue by Nguyen Hoang Tang and Dredge Kang over a refreshing dessert.

** The Long Table format, invented by performer/professor Lois Weaver, is a means of generating open discussion about a specified topic, using a stylized environment and participation protocol to turn ordinary conversation into a performance. ‘The Long Table’ experiments with participation and public engagement by re-appropriating a dinner table atmosphere as a public forum and encouraging informal conversation on serious topics.

About Presenters

Tobaron Waxman
Tobaron is a conceptual artist and curator, based in Brooklyn and Toronto. Recent work history: In 2013 Tobaron performed a cappella vocal endurance work “THE 71st FACE” and showed “Fear of a Bearded Planet” at Lentos Museum in Austria, in exhibition with revered artists Adrian Piper, Claude Cahoun and General Idea. Tobaron was selected by Karen Finley, Jed Wheeler and Travis Chamberlain to be a performing artist in residence in NEA 4 in Residence – New Museum, and developed “ANTHEM” a cantorial recitative countering homonationalism and pinkwashing, and “performance for Tim” in honour of mourners of suicide in Queer communities, in memory of the late Tim Stuttgen. In Canada in 2013, Tobaron founded The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency on the Toronto Island, an all expenses paid summer retreat for LGBTQ artists and curators critically engaged with political histories. In New York, Tobaron has received awards and fellowships for live art practice from Franklin Furnace, Harvestworks NYC, Smack Mellon, the Jewish Museum and Aljira/Creative Capital. In 2014, Tobaron is the artist fellow at Akademie der Künste der Welt / Köln for the year.

Fan Popo
Fan Popo is queer independent filmmaker, and curator. Born in 1985, he graduated from the Beijing Film Academy. He published “Happy Together: Complete Record of a Hundred Queer Films” (Beifang Wenyi Press, 2007). He directs the China Queer Film Festival Tour, which has travelled over 20 major cities in China since 2008.
He has been committee member of Beijing Queer Film Festival since 2009, and board member of Beijing LGBT Center since 2010. In 2011, He received the Prism Prize of the 22nd Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, because of his hardworking on promotion equal rights with films. He is the youngest winner of this honor so far.
His documentary works mostly feature on LGBT/Gender issue, include: New Beijing, New Marriage; Chinese Closet; Paper House; Be a Woman; Mama Rainbow. His films have been shown in film festivals in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Jakarta, Tokyo, Los Angles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Helsinki etc.

Hoang Tan Nguyen
http://www.brynmawr.edu/english/Faculty_and_Staff/HTNguyen.html
Hoang Tan Nguyen teaches and writes about queer cinema, experimental film, Asian American visual culture, video production, race and new media. His book, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke University Press, 2014), examines the depiction of gay Asian bottomhood in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary.

Dredge Kang
http://anthropology.emory.edu/home/people/graduate-students/kang.html
My dissertation research focuses on gender pluralism and social status among gay men and male to female transgender persons (kathoey or sao praphet sawng) in Bangkok, Thailand. I am interested in conceptualizations of gender/sexuality categories, the social legitimacy accorded to these categories, the social and moral status of the individuals inhabiting them, and the relationship of social status to material and embodied outcomes. I am concurrently pursuing an MPH in global epidemiology with a focus on HIV.

About Respondents

Denise Tang
Denise Tse-Shang Tang is an assistant professor in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She is author of Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Her research interests include urban spaces, genders and sexualities, queer studies, celebrity culture and new media. Articles have been published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Tang worked in non-governmental organizations in the issues of violence against women, LGBT, mental health and HIV/AIDS from 1994-2003, and was the Festival Director of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2004 & 2005).
Lucetta Kam
Dr. Kam received her M.Phil and Ph. D in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.Her research interests include Gender and sexuality in Chinese societies, emerging forms of intimacy in contemporary China, Tongzhi communities and activism and Hong Kong studies.

Some of her recent publications include book chapters in AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in the Asia-Pacific (edited by Fran Martin, Peter Jackson et al., 2008) and As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Mainland China and Hong Kong.(edited by Yau Ching, 2010)

Giorgio Biancorosso
Giorgio BIANCOROSSO (Associate Professor) studied music history and film studies at the University of Rome and King’s College, London, before moving to Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in musicology in 2002. Having taught at Northwestern University in 2000-01, in 2001-2003 he was a Mellon Fellow in Music at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Music Department at Columbia in 2003-04. Biancorosso is currently completing a book entitled Musical Aesthetics Through Cinema (under contract with Oxford University Press). He has published in the areas of film and musical aesthetics for the journals ECHO, Music and the Moving Image, AAA/TAC, Music & Letters, and Current Musicology, and has contributed essays to the volumes Bad Music (Routledge, 2004), Il melodramma (Bulzoni, 2007), The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy (2009), Wagner and Cinema (Indiana, 2010), and Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image (Hong Kong, 2010). Aside from film music, film criticism, and musical aesthetics, his interests include musical dramaturgy and the psychology of music. Biancorosso is the Review Editor of Musica Humana and a member of the Programme Committee of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. In recognition of his work, HKU awarded him the Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2009.

About Event
Sexuality and Dimsum

Date: 29 May 2014, 1pm-5pm