2025.05.31 Saturday 15:00
Location
No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Speaker：Kong Degang
Stage plays serve as one of the most vital laboratories for exploring self-discovery, the relationship between the self and the world, and the symbiotic possibilities between works and the public. Contemporary creators are gradually developing a form of locality rooted in the internet-transcending geographical constraints yet subservient to cultural capital. This cyber-locality points to a haunting repetition of spiritually cultivated domains, echoing Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the Trauerspiel (mourning play) in the 21st century.
Cyber-tragic Theatre is not merely a superficial layering of digital technology but a reconfiguration of theatrical ontology. The stage is deconstructed into a mourning space shaped by digital flux, generating cryptic political-aesthetic expressions that offer spiritual resistance pathways to a gamified reality. In this way, theater becomes a laboratory of the future, where cyber-locality based art nurtures the digital natives.
Kong Degang, male, born in June 1992 in Dongyang, Zhejiang, holds a doctoral degree in literature and is a lecturer. His main research areas include Western aesthetic literary theory after the second half of the 20th century, drama, film and television, video games, and new media art criticism.
Art Director of Nanguo Drama Group, screenwriter, director, producer, drama critic, columnist for “Modern Mythology” in The Paper’s ideological market, and council member of the Jiangsu Internet Writers Association.
Since 2012, created nearly 20 avant-garde stage works and performed more than 290 times in various cities. A Chinese Cyber Trauerspiel won the Best Screenplay Award in Zijin Culture and Art Festival（2022）. His works have also been nominated for the Beijing International Youth Drama Festival, Hangzhou International Drama Festival, Sphinx Metaverse Drama Festival, Tianjin Youth Art Festival, and Nanjing Drama Festival. Published multiple papers, reviews, and nearly a hundred theoretical articles in Chinese core journals and major newspapers.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
