Enoch Cheng: Handle with Care

Thu, Jun 9 / 7–8 pm

The exhibition Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art includes a series of live events featuring artists who engage critically with fashion and costume through live and video-based performances.

In a lecture-performance commissioned for the exhibition and taking place in the gallery, Garmenting artist Enoch Cheng explores the relationship between garmenting and personal well-being. Cheng will address the history of how garments have been made, how the various textures of garments contribute to the senses of the wearer, and how the functionality of garments allows or restricts movement. These subjects will be “performed” through the construction and deconstruction of multiple custom-made garments.

The performance will be approximately 40 minutes and will be followed by a talk back. 

Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art is the first global survey to examine the use of clothing as a medium of visual art. By either making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, the 35 international artists in the exhibition create garments, sculpture, installation, and performance art that transforms dress into a critical tool for exploring issues of subjectivity, identity, and difference.

About the Artist

Enoch Cheng is an artist whose practice spans moving image, installation, curating, dance, events, theatre, writing, fashion, performance, and pedagogy. His works explore recurrent themes of place, travel, care, cross-cultural history, fiction, memory, time, migration, and extinction. He was a grantee of Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2020); artist-in-residence at American Museum of Natural History, New York (2020); Laureate, Institut Francais, Paris (2018); and artist-fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2017–2018). 

Image: Morphing (performance still), 2019, Enoch Cheng. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Winnie Yeung, Visual Voices  

Please review our health and safety protocols before you arrive. MAD strongly recommends all visitors six months and older are vaccinated against Covid-19 and visitors ages two and up wear face coverings, even if vaccinated. Thank you for your cooperation.

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