How to be Happy Together?

Para Site presents the exhibition How to be Happy Together?, curated by Zairong Xiang. Departing loosely from Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together (1997), the exhibition enacts a critique of dualism and the questions raised by the dual and its split—between intimate and antagonistic partners, between political entities, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and even between ‘I’ and ‘me’, transcending the logic of ‘either/or’ central to racial capitalism and colonial modernity.

The primary setting for Wong Kar Wai’s queer Hong Kong cinema classic is Buenos Aires—the literal opposite side of the world from Hong Kong. Featuring over twenty artists from Hong Kong, its neighbouring localities, and Latin America, the exhibition alludes to Hong Kong’s clichéd status as a para-site ‘between east and west’, and ‘between tradition and modernity’, in order to interrogate encounters both imagined and real between two seemingly distant ends of the world. It engages with a wide range of artistic practices that stay formally within the pas de deux yet promiscuously open up to an unexpected array of couplings and decouplings, spotlighting overlooked historical, social, and cultural connections between Greater China and the world to rethink possibilities of a queer happy-togetherness.

Artists: Nadim Abbas, Luis Chan, Luke Ching, Chu Ming Silveira, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mimian Hsu, Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, Ocean Leung, Liao Jiaming, Pan Daijing, Beatrix Pang, Ren Hang, So Wing Po, Tang Kwong San & Yuen Nga Chi, Hong-Kai Wang, Xiyadie, Caio Yurgel, Zhou Xiaopeng & Tang Han, Bruno Zhu, and Payne Zhu

Para Site
22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Bldg.
677 King’s Road
Quarry Bay
Hong Kong
Visiting hours: Wed–Sun from 12:00 to 19:00

www.para-site.art