2026.11.12 Thursday 19:00
Location
2F, Lagrené CommonsIntersection of Pu’an Road and Taicang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai
Artists：Hongzheng Pan、Xindi Li
This two-person performative lecture, jointly developed by Hongzheng Pan director of Hong Museum, and artist Xindi Li, takes Pan’s account of institutional practice as its point of departure to examine how individuals and institutions shape one another. The Wenzhou In-Situ Programme (residency) and Wenzhou School (public learning programme) provide two concrete threads. Looking closely at the research, collaboration, and everyday practices within these projects, we reconsider what constitutes “institutional work” and ask how a museum gradually develops its own forms of judgement and ways of working.
The lecture brings together two intertwined narrative strands: the founder’s agency and the institutional articulation that emerges through the texts, records, and collective outcomes generated by its projects. Through a process of selection, editing, and cross-cutting, these two voices respond to and recalibrate one another. Individual intention, institutional judgement, and collective collaboration sometimes align and sometimes diverge.
Starting from the specific case of Hong Museum, we seek to extend these questions to the broader field of cultural institutions in China. How does an organisation that begins with an individual’s aspirations and actions gradually develop forms of judgement, ways of working, and a subjectivity that extend beyond that individual? And how does it establish its own publicness through ongoing negotiation and practice? By examining moments of alignment and asynchrony, we hope not only to understand Hong Museum itself, but also to consider the shared questions and possibilities facing museums and cultural institutions in China as they navigate individual initiative, institutionalisation, and publicness.
Hongzheng Pan is the founder and director of Hong Museum in Wenzhou. He holds an MPhil in East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Sociology from LSE, and an MRes in Social Anthropology from SOAS. He has wandered between places and was once shy of naming the place he came from. Now, amid exhibitions, research and the daily life of the museum, he is finding new ways of being at home in Wenzhou.
Xindi Li (b. 1996, Beijing, China) received his BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. He lives and works in Beijing.
Li’s recent practice explores collective perception embedded within contemporary urban life. He examines how evolving macro-social forces — labor relations, economic structures, and the production of space in present-day China — shape individual lived experience and interiority. His mixed-media installations translate critical reflections on social reality into shareable visual and spatial experiences. Drawing on everyday objects and materials, his works reconfigure these found elements through artistic intervention. With a tone that is parodic yet restrained, they unpack the tensions and frictions concealed beneath the surface of ordinary social life.
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.
