Exhibition · Empty Gallery · Hong Kong
Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama Saturday, August 22, 3PM 18/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung Street Walk-ins welcome, no registration required In tandem with Ann Zhao’s exhibition Spillover, Empty Gallery is grateful to invite Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama for his first lecture in Hong Kong. “The Great Forgetting” will radically reimagine the single most decisive development in the history of medicine: the transition from traditional to modern medicine. Whereas prior histories have portrayed the transition as a shift from a pre-scientific to a scientific understanding of the body, this talk will spotlight the critical role of a entirely different, hitherto overlooked development: the forgetting of past intuitions of time. It was above all these earlier intuitions of time, the talk will argue, that long made traditional medicine feel so compelling to people in the past; and it was the forgetting of these intuitions that now makes traditional medicine seem so strange and exotic. What were these intuitions? Unexpectedly, Spillover offers suggestive clues: Zhao’s evocation of her 本命年 Ben Ming Nian as well as her eye for the propensities shaping particular “moments” lets us glimpse obliquely, but insightfully into the temporal experiences at the heart of traditional medicine. Which is to say that that this past world is not truly past, but actually remains close at hand—though it is habitually overlooked and forgotten and waiting to be noticed and remembered. By bringing together Zhao’s artistic vision with a fresh perspective on the evolution of medicine, this lecture will try to illustrate how deeper reflection on the distant past can refresh and enliven our experience of the here and now. Ann Zhao’s Spillover will be on view through September 5, 2026. Poster design by 阿蕉 Please refer to our comments below for Professor Kuriyama’s full biography.