This program will take place at Public Trust (4017 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104)
Join Taipei-based artist Hong-Kai Wang for a workshop that expands on her place-based and soundscape research to seek openings for transnational solidarity, especially around issues of environmental toxicity.
Intended to examine these issues from a range of community, artistic, and research perspectives, the workshop will begin with brief presentations from the artist alongside environmental justice advocate, Zulene Mayfield, and Dr. Marilyn Howarth, MD, FACOEM (Community Engagement Core at CEET UPenn). The presentations will be followed by a group listening session and conversation examining embodied memory, sound and toxicity, alongside forms of resistance.
This workshop is part of a series of long-term conversations with collaborators that Hong-Kai Wang has developed for a the forthcoming exhibition The Condition of Being Near, opening at ICA in 2026. Her collaborators include current and former residents of Taixi Township in Yunlin County, Taiwan and Chester, Pennsylvania, two communities that have been devastated by industrial-scale environmental toxicity, and Chinese writer-academic Junting Huang.
A detailed but short text by Junting Huang will be circulated to registered participants before the event.
This event will be recorded for research purposes.
Registration
Register to attend this free event here.
Workshop schedule:
6:30pm Opening and introductions
6:40pm facilitated sound-centered memory and association exercise
7:00pm Brief Presentation by Hong-Kai Wang (artist)
7:15pm Brief Presentation by Zulene Mayfield (CRCQL),
7:30pm Brief Presentation by Dr. Marilyn Howarth, MD, FACOEM (Community Engagement Core at Center of Excellence in Environment Toxicology UPenn)
7:45-8:00pm facilitated group listening session
8:00-8:30pm wrap up with facilitated feedback, questions and conversation
About the Facilitators
Hong-Kai Wang
Currently based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist working across exhibition making, curating, performance, writing, publishing and education. She holds a PhD in Practice at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Wang’s research-based practice is concerned with ethics and political aesthetics of listening in relation to politics of missing knowledge and memory. Her work seeks to examine divergent modes of attention and to conceive of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire.
Recent solo projects were shown at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Artspeak, Theater Commons Tokyo, Kunsthall Trondheim, Casino Luxembourg, etc. Group exhibitions at institutions including: Nottingham Contemporary, Colomboscope: A Thousand Channels, Autostrada Biennale, Asia Art Biennial 2019, SculptureCenter, dOCUMENTA 14, Taipei Biennial, Museum of Modern Art New York, among others. She was one of the represented artists at the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.
Junting Huang
Junting Huang is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, SUNY. Before joining Binghamton, he was a College Fellow at Harvard University. His work explores how media and technology shape the way we experience places, remember the past, and connect with one another. He is especially fascinated by the stories sound can tell and how these stories uncover histories of migration, colonialism, and resilience.
Zulene Mayfield (CRCQL)
Zulene Mayfield was born, reared, and educated in the City of Chester. Zulene is a family-oriented person who enjoys the comfort of a large and loving family circle. This focus on family and community life led to her involvement with residents’ groups concerned with the local health impacts of ‘trash-to-steam’ facilities, which in turn led to the founding of the Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) in 1992. Zulene has served as Chairperson of CRCQL since 1993. Since then, CRCQLs successful campaigns have included shutting down the largest processor of infectious medical waste in Pennsylvania, as well as other actions that have led to denied or withdrawn permit applications for additional waste processing operations. Due to CRCQL’s efforts, Pennsylvania now has an office of Environmental Justice, and Zulene has advised other communities facing environmental racism and industrial toxicity. She has served on the Environmental Protection Agency National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, Advisor to the Delco Environmental Alliance and to the Energy Justice Network and is currently Advisor to C-4 (Campus Coalitions Concerning Chester).
Marilyn V. Howarth, MD
Dr. Marilyn Howarth is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Director of the Community Engagement Core of the NIEHS funded Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology where she works with researchers, regulators, legislators and communities to lower environmental risk and improve environmental health. She is the Deputy Director of the NIEHS funded Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health where she leads the Translation Core through which numerous programs focus on improving the environmental health of children. Her work focuses on environmental justice and reduction in environmental health disparities. She has worked in EJ communities in the Philadelphia region on environmental problems including lead exposure, climate change, hydraulic fracturing exposures, air pollution, asthma, legacy pollution, water quality, and flooding among others. She has worked in Chester for more than 10 years. She has provided science testimony to numerous City, State and federal agencies and legislative proceedings. She is a member of several advisory boards at the state health department. She is a past president of the Pennsylvania Occupational and Environmental Medical Society.
Support
Support for this program has been provided by the Taipei Cultural Center in New York. Major support for The Condition of Being Near has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
