London E8 4LY
United Kingdom
Asymmetry announces Configurations, a new research strand that brings its curatorial and discursive work into the exhibitionary. It takes its name from the proposition that exhibitions are not static containers for finished knowledge, but momentary spatial and cross-temporal relations. A configuration suggests a shifting arrangement: one in which artworks, materials, ideas, and histories are brought into renewed contact, allowing established interpretive frameworks to be unsettled and reconstructed.
Configurations marks a new development in Asymmetry’s programme, extending the conditions it creates for curators and researchers to experiment and expand their practices. It creates a space in which curatorial methodologies can themselves be tested and given material form. Each iteration becomes part of an evolving process of enquiry, connecting the exhibitionary to Asymmetry’s wider ecology of public programmes, research, library activity, and publications.
The inaugural exhibition, a cut became an opening, begins with the fragmented archive of Hang on the Box, the Beijing band formed in 1998 and widely described as China’s first all-female punk band. Rather than presenting a retrospective of the band or attempting to complete the archive, a cut became an opening takes its gaps and absences as a point of departure. It considers how accounts of history are made stable through prevailing narratives, images, and surviving materials, and what can be obscured when an artist or group becomes fixed in cultural memory through one moment in their trajectory.
The title draws on the history of dakou: discarded CDs and cassettes “cut” before travelling into China through informal channels during the 1990s. These damaged recordings brought distant music into new contexts, their physical alteration becoming inseparable from the routes by which they arrived and were heard. a cut became an opening carries this logic beyond the materiality of dakou, with fracture, translation, repetition, and deviation understood as part of how the past reaches the present.
Bringing together artists and collectives Bernadette Corporation, Ruth Angel Edwards & Chloée Maugile, Ma Qiusha, Maggie Lee, Peng Zuqiang, and Shenggy Shen, the exhibition places remnants from the Hang on the Box archive into relation with works spanning video, sound, and painting. Through this constellation, the exhibition’s curatorial methodology asks what other meanings might emerge from unexpected proximities, tensions, and encounters.
a cut became an opening is curated by Jessica Kwok, Head of Programmes and Curatorial, with Jiaying Kou, Publications and Programmes Lead.
Exhibition hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–6pm, Saturday, 12–5pm
About Asymmetry
Asymmetry supports curators and researchers with Chinese and Sinophone backgrounds through fellowships, scholarships, public programmes, research, and a specialist library. We promote meaningful exchange between creative practitioners, institutions, and publics to enable generative research, collaboration, and participation. Through five core activities—curatorial fellowships, academic scholarships, public programmes, research, and a specialist library—we offer career-enhancing opportunities while strengthening visibility for curators and researchers who remain underrepresented in the arts and cultural sector. By building partnerships with institutions, art spaces, and universities, we work to expand the landscape of curatorial practice and academic research, contributing to more equitable, inclusive and plural futures for contemporary art. Launched in 2020 by Yan Du, philanthropist and patron of the arts, Asymmetry is an independent non-profit organisation based in London.
Address: Asymmetry, 102a Albion Drive, London E8 4LY, UK
Website: asymmetryart.org
For media enquiries, please contact: Jeremy Chen, Digital and Communications, chen.jeremy@asymmetryart.org
