Curating the Critical Point: Media Art Curators’ Annual Forum

Chronus Art Center is pleased to announce a two-part symposium, “Curating the Critical Point,” to be held on May 25 and May 28, 2025, in conjunction with the Productivity Conference of Art and Technology (PCAT) 2025. The first session will take place at the Huangpu Culture Center in Shanghai, followed by a second virtual session.
We stand at a critical point — a precarious threshold where inherited structures are disintegrating and emergent forms remain embryonic, indistinct. Climate systems edge toward irreversible collapse; algorithmic agents reshape knowledge, labor, and perception; and political and institutional orders falter under the pressure of their own contradictions. Across disciplines and geographies, disruptive currents unsettle the foundations of meaning, dissolving the coordinates by which we once navigated the world.

“Critical Point” thus designates not only a conceptual juncture but an existential condition — a volatile interstice where collapse, becoming, possibility, entropy, and nascent order converge.

In this shifting terrain, the media art curator assumes the role of a steward of unstable ecologies, attuned to burgeoning rhythms and modalities taking shape across erratic grounds. Media art, situated at the juncture of human and machine, organic and synthetic, visible and latent, offers a unique site in which the fractures of the present may give way to worlds still in formation.

To curate at the critical point is to relinquish the pursuit of fixed meaning in favor of cultivating architectures of encounter — incomplete, plural, and in motion. It is to foster spaces of disorientation and imaginative reconstruction, tending to the fragile, uncertain emergence of futures yet unnamed.

Bringing together a constellation of emerging voices and leading curators from China and around the world, the forum traces curatorial gestures reckoning with the ruptures and flux of a world on edge.

<Shanghai Forum>

Date:

May 25, 2025

Time:

10:00 AM – 3:30 PM (CST)

Venue:

Huangpu Culture Center, No. 980 Zhonghua Road, Shanghai, China

Language:

Chinese

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10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Overflow: Platforms and Alternative Curatorial Acts

Opening Remark by 

Diane XING (Independent curator)

Critical Adventures：

Young Chinese Media Art Curators

Keynotes by

Euphy ZHANG, Curator, MetaEye

LI Hanwei, Artist, Curator

Guangyu YANG, Artistic Director, Hyundai Motorstudio  Beijing

Yuehan WANG, Assistant Curator, Tsinghua University Science Museum

Iris LONG, Independent Curator, Berggruen Fellow (2022–2023)

Panel Discussion

Moderated by: Iris LONG

12:30 – 1:30 pm Lunch Break

1:30 – 3:30 pm

The Web of Life: Weaving Technology and Locality into Ecological Narratives

Keynotes by

DAI Xiyun, Independent Curator

HE Yining, Curator, Researcher of Visual Culture

ZHANG Yingying, Independent Curator and Writer

ZONG Xiao, Curatorial and  Artistic Lead, Cc Foundation

Cathye Yang, Deputy Director / Curator, Shanghai Museum of Glass

Panel Discussion

Moderated by: Diane XING

<Online Forum>

Curating the Critical Point

Date:

May 28, 2025

Time:
9:00 AM (EST) / 3:00 PM (CET) / 9:00 PM (CST)

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/98754303373
Meeting ID:

987 5430 3373

Language:

English

(simultaneous interpretation provided in Chinese)

Keynotes by

Michael Conner

Co-Executive Director, Rhizome

Annet Dekker

Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam; Visiting Professor, London South Bank University

Boris Magrini

Senior Curator, LAS Art Foundation

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Curator and Art Historian; Lecturer, UCL;

Research Fellow, ECAL

Kay Watson

Head of Arts Technologies, Serpentine   Gallery

Panel Discussion

Moderated by: ZHANG Ga, Artistic Direction, Chronus Art Center; Professor, China Central Academy of Fine Arts

新时线媒体艺术中心（CAC）成立于2013年，系国内首家致力于媒体艺术之展示、研究/创作及学术交流的非营利性艺术机构。通过展览、驻留、奖学金、讲座、工作坊及相关文献的梳理与出版，CAC为媒体艺术在全球语境中的论述、生产及传播开拓了一个多样化且富有活力的平台。CAC以批判地介入不断改变进而重塑当代经验的媒体技术来推动艺术创新及文化认知。

Established in 2013, Chronus Art Center (CAC) is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art. CAC with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs and through its archiving and publishing initiatives, creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production and dissemination of media art in a global context. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences.

www.chronusartcenter.org