Jason Wee at Para Site, Hong Kong

16 May 2021

Jason Wee presents ‘Quora Fora’ at a group exhibition, Curtain at Para Site Hong Kong.

‘Quora Fora’ is equally contemporary choral music, poetry reading and theatrical performance. Appealing to fans of new music, poetry, Singapore literature, performance art and theatre, ‘Quora Fora’ is an intense, rapidly unfolding installation that culminates in an open proposition to the audience. The artist and writer Jason Wee has been pursuing a practice that encompasses his interests in architecture, poetry, and the body. With his team of collaborators, including the composer Li-Chuan Chong and the architect Quck Zhong Yi of the design practice asolidplan, Jason Wee seeks to examine the notions and ideals in the quorum required for any democratic activation. Conceived as a total performance-installation, with Wee writing the libretto, producing the installation, and creating the choreography and costumes, ‘Quora Fora: A Rehearsal’ seeks to ask, in Wee’s own words, “how do we design the shape and scale of a demos?” Drawing on the performers’ movements through space to unlock and activate considerations around the deliberative assembly, the work can be read as an ongoing search for a new symbolic form of democracy.

Presented across two venues in Hong Kong, Curtain includes site-specific interventions by 24 artists, offering a multi-layered experience that responds to the fluid concept of ‘curtain’. The exhibition makes artistic and conceptual references to passages, frontiers, separations, connections, occupations, circulations, and localities by drawing upon the mundane materiality of the curtain as a domestic object and its scenographic functions in various contexts.

Curtain is curated by Cosmin Costinas, Larys Frogier, Celia Ho, Anqi Li, Billy Tang, and Xu Tiantian, and continues the collaboration between Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China.