2026.07.04 Saturday 19:30
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Artists：Pararailing (Jie Shao, Sixing Xu, Snow Xuecan Ye)
In the spring of 2022, Pararailing launched Railing Codex, a collective writing project initiated with 20 cultural practitioners. Adopting the format of dictionary "entries," the project aims to "redefine" words, language, and meaning, it unfolds in "volumes" through a relay format: contributors in each volume utilize any language and form to interpret a chosen word. In turn, they introduce a new word and nominate a new person to the next volume.
Railing Codex now has 8 volumes, connecting 64 contributors. Traversing regions, cultures, languages, and disciplines, Railing Codex chanllenges the authority of definition to show how collaboration evolves from a linear relay into a collective vortex. For this episode of the Vortex Program, Pararailing collaborates with Railing Codex contributors to trace the trajectories of words as they migrate across geographic coordinates, linguistic environments, and forms of presentation—from Shanghai, Hong Kong to New York, and from website, installation to a slanted dictionary.
Jie Shao (b. 1994, Zhejiang) is an artist based between New York and Shanghai. Through sculpture and installation, his practice explores the resonance between natural cycles and industrial production, tracing the flow of materials across art, industry, and environment. Shao’s solo projects include Wu Jin at Schein Space (2025), Under Table in Albany (2022). His works have been exhibited at Arch Gallery (2026); Hangzhou Museum (2025); NARS Foundation (2023); AIKE Gallery (2023) among others. His writings have appeared in LEAP magazine and Invisible Culture Journal. He has been a resident artist at the Triangle Arts Association (2025), Vermont Studio Center (2023), and NARS Foundation (2023). Shao holds a BFA from the China Academy of Art (2016) and an MFA from Parsons School of Design (2020). He is currently teaching at Pratt Institute.
Sixing Xu (b. 1996, Beijing) is an artist, writer, and translator based in Brooklyn. Xu holds a BA in Media Studies from Vassar College. Informed by a crisscrossing movement between linguistic borders, she makes sculpture–text installations that mine other(ed) meanings and storylines out of the insignificant, the accidental, and the peripheral. Past exhibitions include Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens; Accent Sisters, New York; 601Artspace, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Current Plans, Hong Kong; Shanghai Himalayas Museum; Chengdu Times Art Museum; gallery no one, Chicago, among others. Her writings and projects have appeared in print and on the digital platforms of Spike Art Magazine, The Art Newspaper China, Sine Theta Magazine, Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, and Macalline Art Center. Her translation work can be found in Artforum, LEAP, Heichi Magazine, ArtReview China, SSENSE, among others.
In 2025, she was awarded the Archives Research Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York and was a participant in Triple Canopy’s Publication Intensive and Asia Art Archive in America’s Leadership Camp, both in 2024. Xu was an editor and translator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art’s Research Department.
Snow Xuecan Ye (b. 1994, Fuzhou, Fujian) is an artist currently living and working between Shanghai and New York. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University in 2017, and her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Parsons School of Design in 2020.
Her creative practice spans painting, installation, writing, performance, and moving images. Ye’s work focuses on the intertwining of contemporary technological culture and esoteric knowledge, utilizing sci-fi narratives to weave systems that explore the contradictory and uncanny entanglement between technology and the body. While she highly values somatic intuition and the persistent presence of the "hand-made" in her creation, she also enthusiastically embraces modern technological "prosthetics," such as algorithmic modeling, AI training, and CNC fabrication. Beyond her individual practice, she co-founded and directs the art organization Pararailing alongside two friends.
Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB, Shenzhen), P.Art Group (Shanghai), 601ArtSpace (New York), Current Plans (Hong Kong), TANK Shanghai, AM Art Space (Shanghai), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Tree Art Museum (Beijing), Latitude Gallery (New York), The Kellen Gallery (New York), and Bortolami Gallery (New York). Additionally, her publications are included in the collections of prominent domestic and international art institutions and archives, such as the Chinese Modern Art Archive (CMAA, 2021), Asia Art Archive in America (AAA-A, 2025), Cornell University Library (2025), and the Power Station of Art (PSA) Library in Shanghai (2025).
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.
