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How To Be Happy Together

How To Be Happy Together

Para Site is delighted to present How to be Happy Together?, curated by Zairong Xiang. Departing loosely from Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (1997), the exhibition enacts a critique of dualism and the questions raised by the dual and its split—between intimate and antagonistic partners, between political entities, between 'us' and 'them', and even between 'I' and 'me', transcending the logic of 'either/or' central to racial capitalism and colonial modernity.


The primary setting for Wong Kar Wai's queer Hong Kong cinema classic is Buenos Aires—the literal opposite side of the world from Hong Kong. Featuring over twenty artists from Hong Kong, its neighbouring localities, and Latin America, the exhibition alludes to Hong Kong's clichéd status as a para-site 'between east and west', and 'between tradition and modernity', in order to interrogate encounters both imagined and real between two seemingly distant ends of the world. It engages with a wide range of artistic practices that stay formally within the pas de deux yet promiscuously open up to an unexpected array of couplings and decouplings, spotlighting overlooked historical, social, and cultural connections between Greater China and the world to rethink possibilities of a queer happy-togetherness.


The exhibition's unique spatial design takes its cue from the Tai hexagram of I Ching, which is often used to represent the nine orifices of the human body. Central to the exhibition is the imagery of the orifice, and more broadly, the hole as a portal, which can function as a site for both concealment and revelation. For the first time since Para Site moved to its current location, all nine windows in the exhibition space will be unobstructed, allowing new pathways towards a queer cosmos of happy-togetherness to emerge. The exhibition invites the audience to ponder: How can we live at once with our differences, shared struggles, or even complicity with those we most resist? Can we still live together, happily?************

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Para Site

22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building, 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay

12 Dec 2024 - 6 Apr 2025

12pm - 7pm (Wed-Sun)

2517 4620

Free

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