Third Date

Third Date is a multidisciplinary public program about the disenchantments of love, beauty, bodies, gender, and subjectivity. The program asks: Who gets to be their authentic, true self? And, more importantly, how do those for whom this universal promise remains unfulfilled go about creating and manifesting the most real versions of themselves? This program will feature a creative essay by Wong Binghao that elaborates on their new areas of research, and an integral visual identity designed by Studio Vanessa Ban that will be used for all program publicity material and on the Zoom event itself.

The program comprises original content including academic lectures, creative texts, artist talks, poetry and literary readings, video screenings, and more by artists and thinkers from Southeast Asia, Korea, and their diasporas.

This programmatic form is foremost inspired by artists like Nam June Paik who radically deployed early television and videotape technologies in non-linear, non-hierarchical and often ‘failed’ ways that, instead of perpetuating a corporatized or hegemonic dissemination of ‘knowledge’ to passive viewers, envisioned a contingent, utopian and democratic global community of active participants and interpreters.