Research Seminar: Ari Heinrich

This event is also part of the “Bad Matters: Trans Asia and Improper Materialities” workshop to be held on Oct 22-23.

In this talk, I consider how an ensemble of biopolitically significant substances, deployed as art materials, can reshape how audiences understand viewing environments—and one another. Collectively, I argue, such substances have the capacity to challenge inherited narratives of race, gender, and sexuality through the deliberate positioning of audiences near real or perceived sources of contagion or contamination within exhibition contexts, a tactic I call “strategic proximity.”

I focus on the unique conditions and curation of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, a major multi-site exhibition that ran for less than two weeks in March 2020 before closing early due to COVID-related restrictions. Curated by Brook Andrew, the first Indigenous Australian artist to serve as artistic director of the Biennale, the exhibition foregrounded Indigenous sovereignty while drawing attention to the colonial histories embedded in its institutional sites. I consider Andrew’s curatorial interventions alongside the contribution of queer and trans artist Jes Fan, whose work brought together melanin, blood, semen, urine, and sex hormones—substances that occupy outsized roles in the (bio)political imagination as potential vectors of contamination, whether through “disease” or through racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings. Against the backdrop of the emerging pandemic, I argue that Andrew’s curatorial framework and Fan’s biomaterial interventions exposed and inverted assumptions of separation between museum visitors, exhibition spaces, and the materials on display.

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Ari Heinrich is Gallery Director at the Australian Centre on China in the World and Professor of Chinese Media and Literature at the Australian National University. Their research spans nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese visual cultures, histories of medicine and the body, and anti-Chinese racisms in Europe, North America, and Australia. They have written on subjects ranging from anatomical illustration in China to contemporary Chinese “cadaver art,” as well as on the work of individual artists including Lu Yang, Chi Peng, Kongkee, and Jes Fan.

Heinrich’s books include The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West (Duke, 2008) and Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke, 2018). In 2019, Ari received an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant for research on the use of the pigment melanin in Jes Fan’s work. They are co-editor with Sophie Guo of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of the Society of Asian Humanities on biohazards, toxicity, and the politics of display in modern and contemporary art in Asia and its diasporas. They have also translated queer literature from Taiwan, including Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books, 2014) and Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (Columbia, 2021).

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Shana Ye is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (2024), and her work has appeared in TSQ, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Feminist Media Studies, and several edited volumes. Her current research spans queer material culture, feminist science and technology studies, queer AI, and an SSHRC-sponsored study on digitalization and LGBT aging and eldercare. She is also a creative writer interested in Boys Love, SF and blood.

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For accesibility requests and dietary restrictions, please contact us at wgsi.comms@utoronto.ca