Baoxin Liao: On The Ongoing Labour of Friendship as Infrastructure

Abstract

As I am writing this thesis, the world is in a dark moment, in which I am proposing friendship as an infrastructure for collective art practice, and in this moment, responding and acting with weak words. Starting from the friendship network around me—Guangzhou art collective in Southern China—I compare and analyze the practice of lumbung proposed by ruangrupa, shifting from the perspective of institutional critique to infrastructural critique. From the perspective of institutional critique to infrastructural critique, it examines how radical friendships can trigger art collectives to perform on the street or in living rooms (alternative spaces) through participatory art and collective creation.

In this epidemic period when people are skeptical of infrastructures of all kinds, whether it is the imperfect infrastructures of the art system, the struggles for material and ideological infrastructures taking place within university institutions, or the everyday infrastructures that people rely on for their survival destroyed by bombs. This thesis explores how art activists and art collectives in southern China construct their own infrastructures with fragile human bodies, private rooms, street theaters, mutual care and support, imagining the possibility of a new (art) infrastructure with persistent and painstaking experimentation and radical friendship.

Author Baoxin Liao