What happens if you refuse to fly for work? For gallerists, curators, and critics working in the globalized field of contemporary visual art, air travel and other carbon-intensive infrastructures have become an unavoidable necessity.
This talk will present a research project springing from a single constraint: What happens when an art critic refuses to fly for art events and press trips? Going beyond a narrow understanding of flight-free options (like Zoom talks), the project proposes serious, whimsical, unsettling, even absurdist alternatives. Could one hire an actor as a doppelganger? Stage a Twitch livestream lecture? Retain an attorney as a representative for a day? Jointly review a faraway show with a local critic?
Chan will highlight alternate modes of encounter she has proposed to collaborators throughout the 400+ days she has opted not to fly for art. Pondering ways to decentralize the figure of the global art practitioner, the talk will touch on Conceptual art precedents, the limits of “climate art,” and the perceived futility of individual actions.
Stop by for a lively conversation in CCS Bard Classroom 102 on Wed 4PM — or join in through the livestream link (in bio). I’ll talk about recent collaborations with @zeynepozz@smartglossy_@nutmegandhoney who’ve all helped brainstorm new presentation formats to make one girl’s no-travel dreams come true. Hope you’ll be able to come ❤️🙏🚫✈️🌎💚🌱
So much good art up right now in NYC, these four shows hit me extra hard “in the solar plexus” as my gorgeous friend Caolan likes to say
Reviewed:
Yuko Mohri at @tanyabonakdargallery
Jackie Saccoccio @vandorenwaxter
Raquel Rabinovich @hutchinsonmodern
Josiane MH Pozi (@j0sianep0z ) @artsandlettersnyc
now so exhausted I’m going to sleep, don’t know how the rest of you who do this do it
Is the future bright? Dim? Green? Blue?
The prompt for this volume was to pick a color as a way to think through a possible future. But what color do you pick if you want to think about Hong Kong? I ended up going with “sodium-silver” — what William Gibson pictured when he famously wrote that the sky above the port was the color of tv tuned to a dead channel
(A dead channel isn’t dead, it’s full of signification)
My chapter in Spectral Futures riffs on Hong Kong’s skyglow, transnationality, time zones, and what I’m calling “constitutive blankness.” It was a chance, too, to write about some HK artists whose work I’ve loved for a long time: Christopher K. Ho (@ckh7ckh7 ), Wong Kit Yi (@wong_kit_yi ), and Lee Kit
Thanks to @berndherzogenrath for putting together a wild, imaginative volume
(Last image is @ckh7ckh7 ’s work CX 889: a recreation, in Vancouver, of HK’s former Kai Tak airport)
Last 3 days to see one of my favorite-ever artists and people Alex Jovanovich (@mom_innovations_plus ) and David Carrino in “Actual Queers Kissing” @elliotttempletonfinearts , a show that’s a boudoir of biliously opulent, semi-exhausted hopes for 2026
📷 #2: “We Aren’t Better People,” 2025, by Alex Jovanovich
Some kind soul at the New Yorker put my piece for Photo Booth in this week’s print issue 😭 still nice to see words in ink
Wrote about the terrific show by Inuuteq Storch on view at @momaps1 See it before it closes Feb 23
Thank you to Rachel and @noelletheard for the column, to JF for the connect & most of all to @loribcole for the initial writing prompt that got me to get my act together and start pitching stuff again amid utter life chaos
@ayoung___kim ’s terrific @momaps1 show curated by Ruba Katrib
This show is doing things on many levels so here’s one: never at a New York institution have I felt so seen for the vast amounts of “East Asian internet-based media genres” I have consumed in my life — like epic 164-chapter trash novels about bodies fated to love and hate each other as they’re flung across space and time, ugh the best
In 2012, Triple Canopy published Alix Rule and David Levine’s “International Art English,” which named an opaque, theory-laden idiom that had emerged with digital press releases and been adopted (if also decried) by curators, critics, dealers, and artists. Now, though, IAE seems to be dead: The shift to image-based social media and fragmentation of the art world have sapped the power of press releases to grant legitimacy to art (and to art workers).
For Language Against Intelligence, Rule and Levine will speak with critic Dawn Chan and scholar Dennis Yi Tenen about IAE in the age of ChatGPT and text-based slop. How are the linguistic mechanisms of AI and IAE homogenizing or advancing communication (and thought), while also giving us mystifying gems that seem to thwart comprehension and “calculability”? The conversation will be moderated by Alexander Provan, Triple Canopy’s editor.
Language Against Intelligence will take place on Saturday, October 11, at 5:00 p.m.
All symposium programming is free to attend and will be livestreamed. Visit the link in Triple Canopy’s profile to view the full schedule of events and RSVP.
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The 2025 Triple Canopy Symposium is presented in partnership with Critical Minded and hosted by Roulette.
Worker Coffee will be on site selling coffee and tea. Tapes, publications, and wares will be available from PTP.
Beverages have been graciously provided by Grimm Artisanal Ales, Narragansett Brewing Company, and Zev Rovine Selections.
Media sponsors include Boston Art Review and the New York Review of Books.
@criticalminded_community@roulette_intermedium@davidmarcellevine@thisdawnchan@alexanderprovan@worker_coffee@ptp.vision@grimmales@gansettbeer@zevrovineselections@bostonartreview@nybooks
Biggest of thanks to @dduray8 for covering this ongoing project
For as long as this goes, instead of flying for art I will propose bizarre, absurdist, goofy and whimsical alternatives — because why just settle for Zoom? And why do we have to only feel dread and nihilism when taking on climate change? Why not do this bursting with frenetic joy and weird energies
Thanks to @asiaartarchiveinamerica and @ccsbard for hosting this recent talk
The next chapter will take place in Hong Kong with a doppelgänger also named Dawn Chan — stay tuned
