TRANSLOCAL PRACTICE
OF WAI KUNG
In dialogue with Wai Kung
FVTVRIST Magazine // September 25, 2026
On the occasion of Contemporary Istanbul 2026 (24–27 September), FVTVRIST speaks with Wai Kung, the Hong Kong-born, Berlin-based curator and the fair’s Ambassador for Berlin and Greater China, about a practice shaped by movement between geographies, institutions, cinema and contemporary art.
At the centre of the conversation is translocality. For Wai, it reaches beyond the familiar idea of a bridge between East and West. It is a curatorial method. What happens when an artwork enters another cultural context? How does meaning shift in transit? What becomes of the relationships an exhibition forms once its temporary architecture comes down? Through In the Wake, her project with Taiping Cao, and Weft-Vein, the emerging curatorial initiative she is developing with Hua Xiaochan, Wai Kung considers how curating can create the conditions for ideas, works and people to enter new contexts, form relationships and continue evolving beyond them.
Portrait of Wai Kung. © Courtesy of Wai Kung.
You are speaking to us from Contemporary Istanbul, where this year you are curating In the Wake with Taiping Cao, while also acting as the fair’s Ambassador for Berlin and Greater China. What brought you to Contemporary Istanbul in the first place? And now that you are here, how does the fair feel from the inside?
I came to Istanbul out of curiosity, which is probably the best reason to arrive anywhere. I didn't have a theory about the city before coming, and I am glad I didn’t. What surprised me was the speed with which things could become real here. You meet someone, an idea appears, another person enters the conversation, and suddenly something that was hypothetical in the morning has acquired a shape by the evening. Coming from Berlin, where we can sometimes become extremely sophisticated about the reasons something cannot happen, I found that very refreshing.
Of course, from the inside, Contemporary Istanbul is more complicated than the few days the public sees. A fair is supposed to be about objects: works are brought in, installed, looked at, bought, and eventually taken away. But strangely, what seems to last longest is often what had no object at all, like an introduction, an argument, a dinner, or somebody saying, “You should meet this person.” That is also how Focus Asia began to make sense to me. I would be very happy if something started here this week and, if in two years from now, a collaboration exists and nobody remembers that it began here, I think that would be a beautiful measure of its success.
Much of your practice has developed through moving between cities, cultural contexts and institutional structures through curating, moving image, independent initiatives, and now Contemporary Istanbul. This year, Focus Asia gives Asian artistic practices a particularly visible position within the fair. How have you seen Contemporary Istanbul evolve in its engagement with Asia?
“Asia” is a useful word until you look at it closely. Then it becomes almost impossible. Seoul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta or Istanbul do not produce art from a shared cultural imagination simply because we place them under the same geographical name. Asian galleries had already been present in previous editions of Contemporary Istanbul, but what feels significant this year is that this presence has been given a more deliberate framework through Focus Asia, instead of remaining dispersed within the fair’s wider international programme. I think Focus Asia becomes compelling precisely at that point of difficulty. It gathers practices together without requiring them to represent a continent. An artist can arrive with a very local history, even a private one, and remain specific. The encounter does not need to produce consensus. Perhaps this is also something Istanbul is particularly suited to. The city has lived for centuries with proximity without sameness. Things meet here without necessarily becoming one another. So I would resist trying to define what “Asian contemporary art” looks like. The moment we can recognise it too easily, we have probably reduced it.
Let’s focus on In the Wake by Taiping Cao. The title begins with a maritime image: a wake is the disturbance left in the water as a vessel moves through it. What did you want to express through this idea?
I keep returning to the moment after the vessel has passed. The vessel is already elsewhere, but the water is still carrying the disturbance. The wake makes visible something we usually cannot see: that separation also has a form. I find something similar in Taiping’s suspended footprint. It hangs from its frame by gold coloured silk threads, coated in gold, almost as though it still belongs to the place from which it has fallen. And yet gravity insists on a distance between them. Gravity is perhaps the most important material in the work precisely because we never see it.
You could lift the footprint back toward the frame, even return it exactly to the place that corresponds to it, but the moment you release it, it falls again. The distance reappears. I find that very moving. The work begins to speak about a particular kind of separation: two things remain attached, perhaps even belong to one another, while a force larger than either of them keeps them apart. The silk threads preserve the relation, but they also measure the distance.
So for me, In the Wake is also about this strange condition of attachment. Sometimes what binds us to something is precisely what allows us to feel how far away it has become. Perhaps the breaking point is there. The footprint can return to its frame, but it cannot remain there.
Cao’s practice rests on repeated gesture and the physical relationship between body, tool and material. In No Man’s Land, you focus on perhaps one of the most elementary traces a body can leave behind: the footprint. Why this particular work, within Cao’s wider practice, and why Istanbul in 2026?
I think the footprint is interesting because it is almost embarrassingly human. It has none of the authority of a monument. It is accidental, temporary, usually erased. And then you bring it to Tersane, a place built around enormous ambitions: ships, trade, industry, movement across the world. Suddenly Taiping reduces all of that back to its most basic unit, a person putting one foot in front of another.
I was also interested in what happens when these footprints enter a fair. Thousands of people are walking through the same space, producing real footsteps beneath these constructed ones without thinking about it. So the work is never completely separate from the audience. People are unconsciously repeating its gesture as they move through it. That was one of the reasons I wanted this work here. The exhibition is already happening under your feet.
I USED TO THINK THAT WHEN A WORK TRAVELS, SOMETHING HAPPENS TO ITS MEANING. NOW I AM LESS CERTAIN.
1,3/Cao Taiping, No Man’s Land, 2026. Low-melting-point metals, gold-colored embroidery thread, aluminum. Variable dimensions, 20 parts.
2/Cao Taiping, No Man’s Land, 2026. Low-melting-point metals, gold-colored embroidery thread, aluminum. Variable dimensions, 2 parts.
© Courtesy of Cao Taiping.
Your background moves between contemporary art and filmmaking, and moving image has remained a constant throughout your practice. I have a particular love for Asian cinema myself. But for a Gen Z reader who may encounter your curatorial work before knowing your cinematic references, how has cinema influenced the grammar of your exhibitions, the way you think about sequence, framing, rhythm and space? And give us five films you think they should see.
I have to admit, I am a bit suspicious of the idea of cinema “for Gen Z.”
We don't ask what Bach or Caravaggio is for Gen Z. Art has its own time. You can encounter a film at nineteen and return to it twenty years later; the film has remained where it was, but you have become another spectator. That is one of the mysteries of art. The work has its own time, and we keep arriving inside it from different moments of our lives. Cinema has probably influenced my exhibitions most through duration. I think about what someone encounters first, what should remain unseen for a little longer, or when an image needs silence around it, and how one work changes the memory of another. An exhibition has a form of editing, except the visitor controls the cut.
Five films, today:
1/The Time to Live and the Time to Die by Hou Hsiao-Hsien
2/Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky
3/Farewell My Concubine by Chen Kaige
4/Yunan by Ameer Fakher Eldin
5/Eternity and a Day by Theo Angelopoulos
Ask me again in a year and I may give you five different films.
Following that thread, cinema has also been central to your institutional work. You co-founded CiLENS around Sinophone cinema and cross-cultural artistic exchange, and from 2022 to 2026 you worked with The Feuerle Collection on film programming, moving-image projects and cultural collaborations. Looking back at those years at The Feuerle Collection, which three projects would you single out as the most important to you, and why? I personally loved OPEN-AIR CHINESE FILM NIGHTS. What did that programme allow you to explore?
I think of those years less through the institution than through particular evenings and collaborations. The Open-Air Chinese Film Nights is probably the clearest example. We wanted cinema to become an occasion, not simply a screening. Forbidden Love, the final edition, went further in that direction. Film, live performance, music and Mariages, a conceptual tea pairing created in dialogue with the emotional tones of the films, came together over the same evening. I loved that nobody had to decide which element was illustrating which. They simply shared the same time.
I also remember very vividly the 2024 roundtable Borderless World: Imagination as the Only Destination, with Wim Wenders, anthropologist Biao Xiang, Ke-Xi Wu and Désiré Feuerle. Biao Xiang stayed with me in particular. He seemed to approach some of the same questions from a completely different distance. Suddenly cinema could be spoken about through anthropology, migration, borders, imagination. I liked that the disciplines did not have to collapse into one language in order to speak to one another.
Prélude to Mountain Ghost was more intimate. I became interested in what happens when a performance enters the camera and becomes something else, especially in the distance between the lens and the body.
Looking back, I remember the films, of course, but I remember just as vividly the tea, the weather, the conversations and the bodies in the room. Maybe cinema was never only on the screen for me.
You describe your practice as translocal, as a bridge between East and West. When an artist, artwork or idea enters another cultural context, its meaning inevitably shifts. Can you think of a moment in your own curatorial practice when moving a work into a different context fundamentally changed the way you understood it yourself?
I used to think that when a work travels, something happens to its meaning. Now I am less certain. Perhaps travel simply reveals that the meaning was never fixed to begin with. You see this very clearly between China and Europe. The same image can appear intimate in one place, political in another, historical somewhere else. None of these readings necessarily cancels the others. They expose different possibilities already present in the work. This has changed the way I curate. I feel less compelled to secure the “correct” reading before an audience encounters something. Context is important, of course, but there should always be enough space for the work to escape the context we give it. Maybe that is what translocal means to me now: the work travels, but so does the meaning. And they don't always travel together.
Contemporary Istanbul is already looking towards Focus Germany in 2027, and you are involved in those discussions. Germany is often presented internationally through a very recognisable image: Berlin, its major institutions, established galleries and a particular art-historical narrative. If you have the opportunity to help shape Focus Germany, what would you like Istanbul to see that this familiar international image of Germany tends to leave out?
I think the interesting question is not what Germany leaves out, but whether the image Germany has of itself has caught up with the country it has already become. This feels particularly relevant now. There is an intense political debate about migration, belonging and even what it means to be German. Yet many of the people being discussed as though they were somehow outside this definition are already making its films, exhibiting in its museums, teaching in its universities, running its restaurants, speaking its language, raising children there. The political question is often “Who belongs to Germany?” while everyday life has, in many ways, already answered it. That contradiction is culturally much more interesting to me than presenting either the traditional image of Germany or a new, more fashionable version of it. I would rather Focus Germany stay inside that tension, because I think culture, most of the time, is ahead of the identity that tries to contain it.
1,2/Prélude to Mountain Ghost
© Courtesy of Wai Kung and The Feuerle Collection.
© Courtesy of Wai Kung and The Feuerle Collection.
1,2/Open-Air Chinese Film Nights.© © Courtesy of Wai Kung and The Feuerle Collection.
3/Wai Kung presenting Plum Rain Murmurs, a CiLENS programme curated by Wai Kung at Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, 2025. © Courtesy of Wai Kung and CiLENS.
Tell us about Weft-Vein, the new translocal curatorial initiative you are developing with Hua Xiaochan. Rather than operating from a permanent exhibition space, it develops exhibitions, commissions and cultural projects through collaborations with institutions, galleries and independent platforms across different cities. For our readers discovering Weft-Vein for the first time, what do you want it to become? How do you see the project developing over the next few years?
I don't think Hua and I are trying to build an institution in the conventional sense. We are more interested in building the conditions that allow things to happen. There is a strange moment in the life of many cultural organisations when maintaining the structure begins to consume the energy that was supposed to produce the work. You have a building, a programme, a calendar, a team, and eventually you need projects partly because the structure needs to continue. With Weft-Vein, we want to begin from the opposite direction: first the artist, the question, the necessity of the project, and then we build the structure it requires.
On the other hand, freedom without infrastructure is a fantasy. Money, continuity and trust matter enormously. So we are not interested in being permanently temporary. We want to become stable enough to remain flexible. Hua and I have very different temperaments and ways of working, and I think that difference is one of the strengths of the collaboration. Our roles are quite clearly defined, while our sensibilities complement one another in ways that neither of us could produce alone. In a few years, I hope Weft-Vein has become something slightly difficult to define but very easy to recognise by what it makes possible.
Finally, much of your practice has been shaped by movement: between Hong Kong, Beijing and Berlin; between cinema and contemporary art; and between institutions and independent initiatives. Looking ahead, where do you want this trajectory to take you next?
I think I want to become less obedient to the distinctions I once thought were important. For years, cinema, curating and institutional work seemed like separate paths. Now I am beginning to suspect that the separation existed more in the professional world around them than in the way I actually think. I don't experience an image differently because it belongs to a film or an exhibition. I am still thinking about time, attention, bodies, memory, and what happens when one thing is placed beside another. So perhaps the next step is not another destination, but greater freedom. I want to be able to follow an idea without knowing too early what it is supposed to become. And I like not knowing. At this point in my life, certainty would probably worry me more than uncertainty.
About Wai Kung
Wai Kung is a Hong Kong-born curator, cultural practitioner and filmmaker based in Berlin whose practice moves between contemporary art, moving image and independent cultural initiatives. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she later studied film in Berlin, developing a practice shaped by the movement of artists, images and ideas across geographic, institutional and cultural contexts.
She is a co-founder of CiLENS e.V., a Berlin-based nonprofit dedicated to Sinophone cinema and cross-cultural artistic exchange, and from 2022 to 2026 worked with The Feuerle Collection on film programming, moving-image projects and cultural collaborations. In 2026, Wai joined Contemporary Istanbul as guest curator and Ambassador for Berlin and Greater China. Her project In the Wake, presented within Focus Asia, brings Taiping Cao’s No Man’s Land into dialogue with the architecture and history of Tersane Istanbul, while she is also contributing to discussions around the fair’s Focus Germany in 2027.
With Hua Xiaochan, founder of Hua International, she co-founded Weft-Vein, an independent translocal curatorial initiative. Weft-Vein develops exhibitions, commissions and cultural projects with institutions, galleries and independent platforms across cities.
