Talk with Andrew S. Yang & Ace Le + Nora Taylor

June 2022

‘Crossing the imaginary chasms: Art at the intersections with Science’

The inaugural dialogue for Illuminated Curiosities’s Public Program will dive into various intersections between art and science from three perspectives: curatorial, artistic, and research. Andrew S. Yang is an artist, biologist, and curator who will shed light on various intersections between art and science, drawing from his selective projects that correspond to the thematics in Illuminated Curiosities (The Body, The Ecology, and The History), as well as his artist residency at Yale-NUS in Singapore. After his lecture, Yang will be joined by Dr. Nora Taylor and curator Ace Le, where the panel discussion will move from personal approaches to regional / global tendencies where more art practitioners and institutions are interweaving art and science, particularly at three loci: mode of exhibition display, accessibility to art, and art making in the Anthropocene.

For more information about our exhibition ‘Illuminated Curiosities’, please visit here.

Andrew S. Yang works across the visual arts, natural sciences, and expanded research. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. His writings can be found in Leonardo, Biological Theory, Art Journal, as well as the recent Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies and also Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Yang was inaugural artist-in-residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore (2020), curatorial fellow at the Center for Humans & Nature (2021), and is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Professor Nora Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of ‘Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art’ (Hawaii 2004 and reprinted by Singapore Press 2009), ‘Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology’ (Cornell SEAP Press, 2012) and numerous articles on Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian and Vietnamese Art. She also curated two exhibitions: ‘Changing Identity: Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam’ 2008 and ‘12,759.3 Breathing is Free: Recent Work by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’, SAIC 2010.

Ace Le is an independent art researcher and curator. He is the Founding Director of Lan Tinh Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the archiving, research and exhibition of Vietnamese art. He is also the Chief Editor of Art Republik Vietnam, and a founding member of Of Limits curatorial collective – recipient of 2020 Platform Projects Curatorial Award by NTU Centre of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Ace is the Vietnamese representative in the International Arts Leaders 2022 program by the Australia Council for the Arts. Ace holds an MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, and a Master in Media and Communication from Nanyang Technological University, and a BBA(H) from the National University of Singapore.