Curating the Critical Point
Media Art Curators’ Annual Forum 2025
Organized by Chronus Art Center (CAC)
In conjunction with the Productivity Conference of Art and Technology (PCAT) 2025
May 25, 2025 at Huangpu Culture Center, Shanghai
May 28, 2025, Online
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
May 25, 2025 at Huangpu Culture Center, No. 980 Zhonghua Road, Shanghai, China
10:00 am–12:00 pm (CST), Overflow: Platforms and Alternative Curatorial Acts
Opening Remark by Diane XING: Critical Adventures – Young Chinese Media Art Curators
Keynotes by Euphy ZHANG (Content Curator of MetaEye), LI Hanwei (Artist, Curator), Guangyu YANG (Curator, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing), Yuehan WANG (Assistant Curator, Tsinghua University Science Museum), Iris LONG (Independent Curator). 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 (Researcher and Curator of Photographic Art), ZHANG Yingying (Independent Curator, Writer), ZONG Xiao (Cc Foundation Curator, Program Director), Cathye YANG (Deputy Director / Curator, Shanghai Museum of Glass). Panel Discussion moderated by Diane XING.
# Online Forum: Curating the Critical Point
May 28, 2025, 9:00 am EST / 3:00 pm CET / 9:00 pm CST
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/98754303373
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).
