The Sun Teaches us that History is not Everything, curated by Rapahel Fonseca

Curated by Brazilian Raphael Fonseca, the exhibition seeks to find a dialogue between Southeast Asia, South America, Central America and Mexico. The Sun Teaches us that History is not Everything is part of the Osage Art Foundation's "Regional Perspectives" platform that puts the production of art in Asia into a critical perspective in relation to other geographies. This project brings together 26 artists – 14 from Latin America (Jonas Arrabal, André Terayama, Sandra Nakamura, Mimiam Hsu, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Shinpei Takeda among others), 8 from Southeast Asia (Fx Harsono, Kent Chan, Mark Salvatus, Tromarama, Melati Suryodarmo, Nguyen Trinh) and 4 from Hong Kong and Macau (Linda Lai, Tang Kwok, Eric Fok and Joao O) – and generates new perspectives around contemporary art. All the invited artists from Latin America are descendants of Asian migrants (from China, Japan and Indonesia) and discuss the cultural and familiar specificities that appear in their research. In different ways, we're talking about archaeologists of this multi-layered encounter of Asian and Latin cultures – that needs to be more studied and problematized. Meanwhile, the artists living in Asia include as one of their research focus the European colonialism that affect almost all the area of the South and Southeast of Asia. Colonialism, its reflections in the contemporary era and de-colonial gazes walk side by side. For the exhibition, Raphael Fonseca looked for artists with an interest in a critical articulation between the past and the present. "All of the artists in this project are interested in raising questions about the relations between the historical past and the present. How can the past affect the present and how can contemporary art practice transform historical documents in very different kinds of narratives? What are the relations between macro and micro history?" The first iteration of this initiative was with the exhibition "South by Southeast" curated by Patrick Flores and Anca Verona Mihulet and presented by the Osage Art Foundation in 2015, and the extension of the project "South by Southeast: A Further Surface" presented by Guangdong Times Museum in 2016.