The “Pan-Text” Across South China and Southeast Asia: Language, Image, and Knowledge Production
Workshops and Roundtable
Convened by He Yining
Conceived as a parallel extension of Collecting from the Margins, this project carries forward the main exhibition’s “carrier bag” approach to gathering—refusing the sovereignty of grand narratives, and accumulating the fragments of the everyday instead.
We have invited three practitioners from South China — Chen Yifei (artist and glove puppet storyteller), Huang Siwei (editor and host of the podcast Huaxiantao), and Saul (novelist) — to lead audiences through text into the streets and marketplaces of the South: from the live storytelling of glove puppet theatre, to hand-painted shop signs beneath the arcades, to the southern hinterlands of fiction.
Across two workshops and one roundtable, we ask together: at the margins of daily life, how are words, calligraphy, and images collected, taken apart, and reassembled — and how do they come to generate narratives and knowledge of our own?
Workshop I｜Chen Yifei: Puppetry on the Move — The Puppet as Medium and the Micro-Narrative
13:00–15:00
Building on Chen Yifei’s puppet storytelling and self-organised practice, this workshop considers how text, image, and dialect interweave in puppet performance to form a “carrier bag” capacious enough to hold individual experience. Following the artist’s trajectory across different times and places, we look for the paths of micro-expression that escape grand narrative — observing how a maker, rather than relying on large institutions, sustains spaces of memory and mutual aid through concrete, everyday acts of making.
Taking the puppet as medium, participants will improvise and perform on site, weaving personal memory into the seams between image and word, and rebuilding narrative connections between people through tangible action.
Workshop II｜Huang Siwei: Starting from Signage — Reading the Text of the City
15:15–16:45
To walk down a street is to encounter countless texts and signs set upon every available surface — and as we read the city, the city becomes an inexhaustible archive in return.
Walking and looking are central to Huang Siwei’s method. Over the past decade and more, she has gathered the city’s readable matter — signage, notices, menus, handwritten characters, and much besides — across cities in southern China, in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and in Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia and Europe.
Using these collections as a thread, the workshop examines how lettering on the street becomes a sign, and how such signs are dismantled and remade under conditions of globalisation. Participants will learn how to look at a shop sign in the street, and — guided by the signage of roadside shops and market vendors — will make a sign of their own.
Roundtable｜The “Pan-Text” Across South China and Southeast Asia: Language, Image, and Knowledge Production
17:00–18:00
Speakers: Chen Yifei, Huang Siwei, Saul Moderator: He Yining
Drawing on their respective practices—storytelling and printmaking, the collecting of street lettering, and fiction writing—the three speakers consider the forms the “pan-text” takes within the local experience of South China and how image and word continue to produce new knowledge and new narratives within vernacular contexts. The discussion responds to the main exhibition’s central proposition: the collecting of that which cannot be spoken, and that which goes unspoken.