Artists: Saturday Class

Kang Ya-Chu is a Taipei-based artist. Her work explores issues of identity, the relationship between human and nature and the social environment through mix-media sculpture, site-specific installation, land art, video, drawing, photographs, textile research and collaboration. Drawing inspiration from her travel experience and the rich weaving history of the world, Kang’s work often reflects themes of boundary related to life and death, yin and yang, identity and camouflage, private and public, known and unknown, artificial and natural. The materials themselves carry nostalgia and original meanings often hidden by their symbolisms. Described as ‘simulation objects’, her work eliminates the boundary between usable items and sculptures — the functional and the aesthetic. She works with the treatment of surfaces and exteriors often through the medium of textile. The processes include embracing accidents, mutations and accretions of surface and detail with time, accepting that nature will have its way, with changeable, variable, transient and fluid mediums such as plants, sun, salt and water, and considers the possibility of environmental sustainable development.

Venera Khalikova, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, is an anthropologist who does research about traditional medicine, food, nationalism and gender in India and the Himalayas. Khalikova holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Prior to the doctoral program, she had completed an MA in anthropology in India and a bachelor’s program in anthropology in Russia. In addition to academic publications in English and Russian, Khalikova also writes online posts for Cultural Anthropology about pedagogy.

Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor and Head of Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong and Visiting Professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University, India. She is the curator of the India-China musical collaboration project, ‘Saath-Saath: Music across the Waters’, which began in 2016.

Among her books are Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2020). Her edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Delhi, 2015), with Wang Xiaoming.

Bindhu Malini Narayanaswamy, an Indian singer and composer, is one of the few artistes who has pursued training in both Carnatic (from South India) and Hindustani (from North India) classical forms, and yet has also constantly strived to explore avenues outside of her strict classical roots to other forms and traditions in search of the pure soul-stirring power that music has. This has given form to a light yet confident personal style for her as a performer. Narayanaswamy has composed and sung for films, theatre productions and independent albums in Hindi, Kannada and Tamil.

Kathleen L Wyma is an art historian and independent curator who specialises in global modern and contemporary art with a special research interest in India. Wyma completed her PhD in 2007 at the University of British Columbia (Canada) with a thesis entitled The Discourse and Practice of Radicalism in Contemporary Indian Art 1960-1990. She regularly contributes articles and exhibition catalogues on Indian contemporary art, most recent publications include: “Poetics and Procrustean Possibilities,” Zakkir Hussain: The Procrustean Bed (Mumbai: Guild Art Gallery, 2017) and “Photography at the Edge of Representation: Rethinking Photographs of Rural India,” in Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice, eds., Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah (Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) and “Constructing the Eco-dimensions of Intangible Heritage,” Arunkumar HG: CON-struction (Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2018). Wyma currently teaches a range of courses in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong.