2026.09.27 Sunday 16:00
Location
TANK Shanghai 2380 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai
Artist：Li Yuhang
Guest Artist：Yu Zeu
Ghost Island is a spin-off of the long-term research project Natural Law. This project has evolved from reflections on long-term fieldwork in highland regions, combined with the dramatic history of Ferdinandea Island. Located off the coast of Sicily, this legendary "ghost island" is not a permanent landmass, but an intermittently erupting submarine volcano, serving as an ultimate manifestation of the contest between positive law and natural law. When the island emerges from the sea, it is instantly designated as terra nullius; when it sinks back beneath the waves, it returns to the high seas. Drawing from field observations on the plateau, the project traces how sub-crustal minerals are woven into local conceptions of wealth and gold legends, embodying a latent curse. By invoking ancient oaths, sub-terranean gold, and mythical lore, Ghost Island contemplates natural law directly from the earth’s crust. Plate tectonics represents not only the agony of the lithosphere, but the very moment of its autonomous agency.
Li Yuhang is an artist and researcher whose creative practice and academic inquiry mutually inspire each other. Starting from language, her work navigates through oaths and ultimately addresses natural law. She is a PhD candidate at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) and holds master's degrees from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Beaux-Arts de Marseille.
Born in Northeast China in 1997 and a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yu Zeu currently lives and works in Shanghai. His artistic practice seeks to forge a meaningful connection between the traditional grammar of performance art and the novel, absurd realities experienced by Generation Z, while expanding the boundaries of performance through mediums such as video, virtual reality, live performance, installation, and commercial products. Yu Zeu is also the founder of Art-Van-Tent (AVT), a mobile contemporary art space dedicated to supporting the work of young artists with an attitude that is at once raw and absurd, yet focused and independent—collaborating with them to "build the path traveled."
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.
