TalkingPoint with Dan S. Wang: What Do Places Have to Do With It?

TalkingPoint with Dan S. Wang: What Do Places Have to Do With It?
HPAC/file
TalkingPoint with Dan S. Wang: What Do Places Have to Do With It?
HPAC/file

TalkingPoint with Dan S. Wang: What Do Places Have to Do With It?

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HPAC’s unconventional series of discussions reinvents the artist talk, built around dialogue and conversation amongst all participants rather than lectures or panels.

In this installment, Dan S. Wang talks about the why’s and what’s of being an artist in three places, each of a different scale, near to his heart and mind: the Upper Midwest, Greater China, and the South Side of Chicago. This “placed” practice in its three dimensions can be seen in Dan’s involvement in three shows happening this fall, all on the South Side:  Heartland at the Smart Museum, Demise at the South Side Community Art Center, and Shanghype! at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Dan S. Wang is an artist, printer, and writer who has been active in a variety of progressive causes for his whole adult life.  He was born in the American Midwest in 1968 to immigrant parents.  He earned a B.A. degree from Carleton College and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He teaches printmaking as adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago. His makes his home in Madison, Wisconsin.

His texts have been published in many places, including SITE magazine (Stockholm), WhiteWalls (Chicago), Art Journal (New York), ARTasiapacific (New York), the Journal for North East Issues (Hamburg), the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (LA), and the catalogue for the exhibition Heartland at the Smart Museum. His drawings, prints, sculptures, and photography have been exhibited in two solo exhibtions and more than twenty-five group exhibitions. He has lectured in many places, including at The Contemporary (Baltimore), the Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg, Austria), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Depot for Kunst and Diskussion (Vienna), and at Documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany). Along with seven others, he co-founded Mess Hall, an experimental cultural space in Chicago, and regularly collaborates with a range of art groups, activists, and researchers.

Recorded Monday, November 02, 2009 at Hyde Park Art Center.