AUUUUDITORIUM March | Spinning Time: A Lecture Performance

Spinning Time is a lecture performance by artist Ho Rui An, and editor and curator Zian Chen. It focuses on Chinese textile industry over the past one hundred years and its many extensions since the emergence of industrial capitalism within the Yangtze River Delta region. They trace the networked lines of labor, technology, and capital that make up one river delta region flow into another as the textile histories along the Yangtze River are woven with those of its southern double, the Pearl River. Drawing upon their research across Shanghai, Nantong, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, Ho Rui An and Zian Chen construct a timeline that inquires into the displacements and returns that characterize over a century of China's modern textile history as much as it reflects on the time of history itself.
Spinning Time was the first program of The Rockbund Art Museum's AUUUUDITORIUM program, which is housed on the second floor of Rockbund Art Museum. AUUUUDITORIUM is a multifaceted ongoing project that blurs the lines between exhibition installation, theater, nightclub, and collective study space. It turns the museum gallery into a site of year-round activities, public and private. The second floor of the museum was once the Wu Lien-teh Auditorium of the Royal Asiatic Society, a significant venue inaugurated in 1933. This auditorium served as a central hub for R.A.S. members to share their discoveries, which were later published in the China Journal (1923-1941). Today, AUUUUDITORIUM hosts Scenography for a Shanghai Science Fiction Opera (2024), a newly commissioned installation by artist Ming Wong.
At the core of AUUUUDITORIUM is a dynamic approach to the act of study, prioritizing motion, circulation, and redistribution over static learning, which fosters a collective thinking mode that challenges and expands traditional institutional thought processes. AUUUUDITORIUM is more than an artistic and academic venture; it is an active experiment in knowledge production and dissemination.