The proposed exhibition “A Contemporary Art Experiment, From Go Seigen to AlphaGo” has been selected as the winning exhibition for the 2021 OCAT Research-Based Curatorial Project, “ at the OCAT Research Center in Beijing. The selection “means we get to stage another, bigger exhibition for the next stage with the entire museum space at our disposal later this year,” reports Zhiyan Yang, who will curate the show with Chen Jiayi.
“We were happy to be one of the ‘Artists’ providing materials,” says AGF President Terry Benson, who along with longtime AGAers Roy Laird and Barbara Calhoun recorded some Silly Go Songs showing the broader cultural of Go in the west. Some of the old covers of the American Go Journal (below) were also included.
A total of 29 proposals were initially made, with a resulting shortlist of five, including “The Flow of Broken Mirrors: Rewriting ‘Modernity’ in Perception of Boundaries,” “Why Everything Has Not Disappeared,” “The Fragile and Dangerous Domain of Optimism – Redefinition and Reproduction of Failure,” “Algorithms: The Magician of Exhibition Knowledge Production” and the winner, “Go, A Contemporary Art Research Experiment – From Wu Qingyuan to AlphaGo” which “explores how go, as an ‘old media’ and a rearguard culture in the contemporary context, transcends its own attributes as a game, and produces more diversity in the process of blending with cultural practice and artistic creation.” CLICK HERE for a walk-through of the exhibit featuring the five finalist projects.
An expanded exhibition – with more materials from the AGA – will be mounted in Beijing later this year.
