 Mi yw Sarah Turner, rydyn ni'n gyfnodd y dyfodol ar gyfer y Fyglwyr yma yn Y Llywodraeth Cymru. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r cyfrifodol i'r ffordd o'i bod yn ymddangos i'r dda'i. A'r hyn yn ymddangos i'r ffyrdd yn ymddangos i'r cynllun o'r symposiwn, Lucy Steed, dyfodd Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Cymru, rydyn ni'n gyfer y front i'r cyfrifodol i'r grwm. a Hemaad Nosha, sydd yn gyflawni gyfnodd ar y poriad dynol a gyfermiannol. Mae Cyngor Llywodraeth yn ymgyrchu Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Cymru, ac yn ymgyrchu Llywodraeth Cymru. Ac yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch am ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac yn ychwaith gweithwyr, ac mae'n dweud o'i felon rhuniau a'i ddweud yn gweithwyr yma ac yn y gallu'r gweithwyr amddangos. Yn i meddwl, rhywbeth yn ddefnyddiad Caith Jessen, Natasha Howes, fries Victoria Wilson, Alastair Huston a'na ar ddysgu'r cymdeithas yng Nghymru yn ei hynny'n helpu'r synthoseon. Y回odd Lyfiad Lwyddon haf o fwy ffiannig ddau wrth yr ogylched, mae'n arwynt i'r parwydd iawn, gyda gweld, criatwyr ac ysgol. Fy na gennym nhw'n gwybod ymddangos ac yn ymddangos, ac yn ymddangos y cyfnod o'r gweithio'r gwasanaeth. Mae'r gwasanaeth ymddangos i'r gwasanaethau yn ymddangos cyfnodol, mae'r Llyfrgellol Llyfrgell, mae'r UAL, mae'r University of Manchester, ac yn amlwgais i'r cwlaeddau yn y ddechrau, David Butler, mae'r ddechrau'r Llyfrgell. Mae'r ddechrau'n gweithio'r Llyfrgell, yn yw'r cyfnod oedd yn ymgyrchol i'r ffordd. Rwy'n dweud i'n gwneud yn gwyloedd o'r Cyfnod i'r ein hynny'n gilydd iawn. Mae'r ddafiau, ac mae'n gwneud eich gweld yr argyrchu yn y ffordd o'r cyffredinol yn ymgyrchol gan yw'r gwahod. Rwy'n ddweud a'u bod yn ymgyrchol i'r cyffredinol, rwy'n gwneud i'n ddweud a'u cyfnod o'r gwahod o'r cyfleoedd ymgyrchol o'r cyffredinol ymgyrchol i'r cyffredinol with Hermar and Kate, and hear their ideas and have these amazing moments of punctuation. To really think in new ways about the exhibition. Exhibitions in many ways are not just the end points of project so much incredible work goes into them and getting them ready. But their really launched their springboard for further thinking and research and hopefully provoking and prompting new thinking, new narratives, and new ways of practice. ymddangos iawn, mae'r modd i'r gweithio'r LYC yn ysgolwyddiadau, a rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r gweithio'r LYC yn ysgolwyddiadau. Mae'n gwybod i'r gweithio'r LYC yn ysgolwyddiadau i'r hysri ac yn ysgolwyddiadau i Llywodraeth a Llywodraeth, i'n gweithio'r LYC yn ysgolwyddiadau i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r llaw o'r cymrydau cymrydau, a dydy'n mynd yw'n mynd i'ch ddweud â'r Llywodraeth i'ch ddyn nhw i'ch ddweud Llywodraeth's ysgolaf, i'ch ddigonio Llywodraeth's cymrydau i'ch ddwyltau yw'r llaw, bwysig i ddweud hynny'n ar hyn yn ysgolwyddiadau. Ysgolwyddiadau'r LYC yn ysgolwyddiadau i'r number o prosiectau. Mae'r Llywodraeth yw'r modd i ysgolwyddiadau i'r Llywodraeth i'r Lywodraeth i ddechrau hyd nu, ac yn ystod o'r projektyn Lundin, ychydig yw Hymard i'r Cogonfyn yma ar y Cogonfyn. Mae'r projektyn yn gweithio gweithio o'r tari gweithio ar gyfer y brithys arddangos a'r hynny o'r hynny o'r hystrys i gael i'r hynny o'r prydys i'r cymdeithas o'r bwysig a'r hynny o'r hystrys o'r rhwn psychosig yn Brytyn. Dyna chwarae ymwneudol wedi gwneud bydd y cwysffordotau i会 yaptig ac bydd yn gallu bod meddwl yma yn y DU они nad yw arddangos i ddim yn leirio Cymru i gynhyrch angen i i ddweud ond mae'r dynig fi whitesbeth o blaen ac robotics am y brifysghau ac gan Là'r retiren ac nowelarn nhw i dweud ac iechid ar Pygysig You are part of this collaborative research project and programme of thinking together inspired by an exhibition. I want us to think about our sessions with their treos, the two papers and the respondents, as something of an LYC three-way ping-pong table. We are going to have a playful bouncing of ideas between us all, and there will be plenty of breaks within the programme. We encourage you to go and explore the exhibition in those, to watch Helen Hett's amazing film and to share ideas amongst yourselves. Now I am going to hand over to my collaborator and master ping-pong player, Hermad Nasser. Thank you, Sarah, and I think there will be bats involved at the table upstairs today. I am going to start very briefly with a couple more things. First we just acknowledge Christopher Payne, I did see him from the University of Manchester, he was very much part of the team and put him together at the symposium, and also thank the many, many people who made not just the exhibition, but particularly this paper possible, Nick Sawyer, the team at the Taipei Fine Art Museum, who were so generous in sharing their research, Mei Qing Fang, Wei Yu, Kai Wei Wang, and Jeanette Martin and Stella Hawkeard at the John Royden's Library. Last but not least, Sarah Turner for her valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. As I see around, maybe I think only three of you have suffered before, so apologies for that, because you will see some familiar images, but I will make a start. Now in the last few years the work of Chinese-born artist Lee Wan Chia, 1929 to 1994, has featured in two very different exhibitions on two continents in two national institutions that could both claim him as their own. In Taiwan, the Taipei Fine Art Museum did just that, with a posthumous retrospective that positioned him as the father of conceptual and abstract art in Taiwan. It traced his practice over five years, over five decades rather. In Britain, however, Lee remains largely unrecognised. Though he was home from 1966 until his death in 1994, his work was a minor presence in Tate Britain's migrations journeys into British art in 2012, and a recent display at Tate Modern was only slightly more expansive. His work was entirely absent from the Tate Britain exhibition Conceptual Art in Britain 1964 to 1979, and is unaccounted for in the generally circulating institutional and academic histories of art in Britain. This is at least partly due to the distinctive genealogy of Lee's work that resists attempts to slot it into a singular label. He drew liberally from modernist, Zen, Buddhist and Taoist practices. To explore ideas of space, life and time, the initial vehicle for his exploration was the point, the origin and end of creation that was so beautifully evoked in two of the performances yesterday, both from Madeline Huigast and Carol Cee and Bettina Fung. Originally a spot of colour or a mark in monochromatic paintings and reliefs, it eventually took the form of magnetised objects or toys, as these call them, inviting active audience participation. Now this sense of play and participation was taking new forms by the time of his Golden Moonshow in 1969 at the Listen Gallery. The retrospective at the Taipei Fine Art Museum and a growing engagement with artists associated with Signals Gallery has sparked new interest in Lee's work, with a clutch of recent exhibitions in London and Taipei. But despite this more recent interest, art history is yet to seriously engage with arguably his most important work, the remarkable space he founded in the Cumbria countryside. The LYC Museum and Art Gallery was located in the village of Banks, a stride Hadrian's Wall. Lee Wan Chia's initials gave the museum its name, LYC. Between 1972 and 1983, the museum showcased the work of more than 320 artists, from local figures, Andy Christian, Suzy Onnath, to totemic national artists such as Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth. Contemporary artists now of international renown, so of Leisha Clark or Andy Goldsworthy, but then barely known in Britain. You'll recognise this picture from yesterday. So Lee standing in front of a window designed and produced by a young David Nash. The networks and practices that the LYC Museum enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely, for example, his friendship with a concrete poet and Benedictine monk Don Sylvester Houdard, or the pioneering sound artist Delia Darbyshire, Lee's assistant, and briefly partner at the LYC Museum in 1976 and 77. Friendships and the expanded notions of infrastructure, they often become part of, are growing areas of recent scholarship. That can productively illuminate any consideration of the LYC, and I'd particularly like to point to Leila Gandhi's charting of the politics of friendship in her book, Effective Communities. And in her recent essay, Infrastructure as Form, Karen Zitzewitz argues for the need for us not to separate the analysis of art from the activities from which they emerge to do so, she contends, would attribute artistic production exclusively to the artist and ignore how ably a network art infrastructure distributes agency among its elements. I would argue that the LYC Museum is an exemplary site from which to explore both these formulations, the question of how friendships and form shared practices generate work and socialized narrative, and how the LYC itself functions as a kind of infrastructure. As Sarah mentioned, the LYC Museum has been evoked in a stylized reconstruction and is very much at the heart of the exhibition that hopefully most of you have seen upstairs. This paper is a series of notes and speculations towards a larger collective project of which the symposium is an important part. It explores these ideas of friendship and, to a lesser extent, infrastructure through the lens of three works in the Speech Acts exhibition. All three works are participatory and have to a different extent collective authorship and a relationship with me. It attempts to read the traces of friendships in objects and situations. The principal artwork is the LYC Museum and Art Gallery itself. The second is the video work point in time by Madeline Huicas that you can see and Elsa Stensfield that features Lee as a participant and you can see in the exhibition upstairs. The third and final example is the newly commissioned film Space and Freedom by Helen Petts that I hope you will get the chance to see over lunchtime today. Now the LYC Museum has often been positioned as Lee sacrificing his own practice while he gave his and I quote attention to others. But I would like to place the LYC Museum in an artistic trajectory that saw Lee moving from static objects to the production of work that invited participation from audiences to animate the work. The museum started life as a set of dilapidated farm buildings that Lee acquired from his friend and neighbor, the painter benefit Nicholson. The LYC Museum ran an exhibition program as we've already discussed of prodigious range and eclecticism. It reflected Lee's circuitous cosmopolitanism and his commitment to art as a mode of experimentation. For Lee was also a poet, a designer maker and a curator of art and social interaction. Born in Guangxi, China, he moved to Taiwan in 49 where he was part of the Tong Fan group of artists. Experimenting with abstraction, in 62 he moved to Bologna where he was associated with the Puntau group of artists. An invitation to show at the Signals Gallery from David Madala brings him to London in 1966. There he had multiple solo and group exhibitions at the Listen Gallery between 67 and 70, showing alongside artists such as Ken Cox, Mira Shendo, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Derek Jarman. But London's regard for Lee was not wholly reciprocated. A trip to his friend Nick Sawyer's family house in Cumbria, Boothby, for Christmas in 1967 saw him settle in nearby Bangside, opening the LYC Museum in 1972. The museum consumed Lee. He built it himself, undertaking all building, plumbing, electrical work. It hosted four new exhibitions a month, each accompanied by a catalogue that he designed and printed. Apart from galleries, the LYC Museum had an arts room, a library, a performance space, a printing press, a communal kitchen, and a garden. It hosted rug-making workshops. Children played in its courtyard. It was an open space for the multiple possibilities of art. The artist Sheila Wakeley, whose work is also in our little LYC hut upstairs, exhibited at the LYC in 1979 and saw the museum very much as a work of his. It was an example of social practice before such a thing was named and tamed. After its closure in 83, it became the site of Lee's experimentation with hand-tinted photographs. Lee's establishment of the LYC Museum in 1972 has been called an impulsive, intuitive move. I read the LYC's formulation as a central progression of the experimentation that Lee was engaged in during his time at Boothby, 67 to 71. Boothby was Sawyer's stepfather's family house. Wilfred Roberts was a farmer turned radical liberal politician who Sawyer recounts as, my quote, playing chess with Wyndam Lewis, getting drunk with Dylan Thomas, and dining out with Stalin. Robert's elder sister was Winifred Nicholson. Wilfred and Winifred were grandchildren of George Howard, the 9th Earl of Caillir, and a painter, as his obituary notes, of pre-Raphaelite tendencies, and a younger member of the circle of William Morris and Byrne Jones. So Boothby was the repository of unusual artistic treasures. A bombard hung in Sawyer's bedroom. Sawyer recounts coming through hand-painted William Blake manuscript as a child, and being surrounded by artworks by Moore, Rosetti, and of course, Winifred Nicholson. Now Nicholson moved from Paris to Boothby early during the Second World War and made it her Cumbrian base for the next 20 years. She painted views from the house as well as its interiors. And on arriving at Boothby on Christmas in 67, Lee struck a friendship with Wilfred and Kate Roberts and was offered a large studio room in Boothby at nominal rent. The very room previously occupied by Winifred Nicholson, and those very views also inspired Lee and found voice in his poetry. And I'm sort of just particularly draw attention to this sort of the bold bit. So I like Brampton for its make me to love this world again. It sort of highlights what Lee had spoken about earlier of coming to Cumbria in search of space and freedom and managed to establish a livelihood through gardening, painting, decorating, which allowed him to experiment in his studio at Boothby without the need to sell to survive. And the two self-organized exhibitions he held in Boothby evidence a growing interest in exhibiting environmental and participatory works. The first was held in October 68, the second in June 69. So both before the listen gallery show that showed you an image of earlier. Now Richard De Marco's digital archive offers a set of installation shots of the first Boothby exhibition. The photos show elaborate arrangements of Lee's circular disc, many with multiple magnetic points. Plastic sheets hung from the ceiling with circular holes cutting them, delineating microenvironments within the larger space. And you can see these wall hangings at the back also of Lee's work. And most curiously an arrangement of Lee's geometric points on a tufted circular rug. Several photographs show Lee encouraging his visitors to interact directly with the work. He also installed a weblight installation with washing lines strung across the trees in the courtyard of Boothby. And one important trace of these exhibitions at Boothby is a tablecloth that served as Lee's visitor's book. And if you examine some of the names there, Audrey Barker, E.J. Hooper, Vineford Nicholls, Hediglson, any one of these names opens up trajectories that are vast. One of those trajectories of course leads to a little known but important exhibition called Popa at MoMA, pioneers of part art or participatory art at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 71. Alongside Lee it featured Leisure Clarke, John Duggar, David Madala, Helio Attisica and Graham Stevens. And it reached not a variety for when a jolly young Oxford crowd took the part art manifesto literally. And as Hilary Flo quotes, everything was getting smashed. Two of the artists who were there for the opening, Madala and Duggar, withdrew their work. Lee was happy to let his work be. A show open and closed on the same evening. And it raises questions for the role of participatory art in the museum. And I also closed this section with the proposition that the LYC Museum was Lee showing us how participatory art could live in a museum setting, where the operational activity of running a museum, the openings, the performances, the programming, publishing, could themselves be considered part of an artwork. It suggests that Lee's engagement with place, a close circle of friends and distinctive artistic visions played an important role in shaping Lee's imagination of what the LYC Museum could be. In the LYC, Lee had fashioned a machine capable of changing people's relationship with art, with each other and hence with life. Or, as he earlier phrased it, to make him fall in love with the world again. Now, the second artwork that I want to focus on, I'll start actually with something from the archive. A book produced with Madalyn Huikas. And it documents, it's a photo documentation of Madalyn's day at a Japanese monastery. And the inside cover has this sort of a trace of ownership from Delia Derbyshire with Madalyn's personal inscription to the LYC Library. And Elsin and Madalyn, as many of you would have heard yesterday at the performance in conversation with David Butler, were video pioneers. They met at the Lee's School of Art and Design in 1966, became friends and collaborators. Madalyn worked with Elsa at her film and sound studio, and then they were joined later by Delia Derbyshire. They then made two films together, and when Derbyshire moved to Cumbria, they visited their friend at the LYC, met Lee, ended up showing at the LYC Museum, and becoming Lee's friends. The video point in time dates from when Lee visited them in Holland after the LYC closed. It suggests a journey, both physical and internal. The physical one is dominated by footage of a rocky terrain that seems to be in shock from a moving car and then slowed down. It is frequently abstracted. A modulated drone evokes and then echoes highland winds. We see Lee's hands preparing for and performing calligraphy. An ink stick is pressed against a stone mortar and then ground down through steady rhythmic circular movements. My newt amounts of water are mixed into the ink to modulate the thickness. Too thick and the writing will not be fluent. Too thin and the ink will flow too fast. This is obviously a practice ritual. We follow Lee's hands, dip a brush into the ink, and describe Chinese characters on paper. The movement is not the dramatic flourish of a heroic drip painting, but more the careful listening of the divining stick, or dowsing rod being manipulated over land to locate a source of water. And as the brush touches the paper, we witness the small oceans of ink from which the calligrapher structures meaning. This is a search. A reading that is lent support by the appearance of an enigmatic compass that frames both the beginning and the end of the work. The movement of the needle from true north north to wild gyrations suggests circuitous roots. Point in time encapsulates an exchange of ideas, aesthetics, and effective registers, nurtured through years of discussions with Lee, but also with Delia Darbyshire's electronic compositions. It also hints at a shared interest in Buddhism that inflects both practices, those of Lee and Stansfield Pwydcas. As Dorothy of Frank points out, Buddhists are not primarily believers, but practitioners. A section of Frank's text on Stansfield Pwydcas bears the title, saying what cannot be said, and is an uncanny echo of the title of the survey exhibition of Lee's work, Lee Wan Chyr, tell me what is not yet said, curated by Guy Brett in the year 2000. Both titles emphasise the unknown, the unsaid, and the unsayable, and suggests the primacy of encounter and feeling as a way to experience the practice of both Lee and Stansfield in Pwydcas. Now, if Pwydcas Stansfield were friends Lee knew, Helen Petz was a friend he didn't. Her film, Space and Freedom, was newly commissioned for Speech Acts and takes its name from Lee's search for the same in Cumbria. It begins in darkness. There are no titles, no images, and a black screen. It heightens our sense of hearing, but despite this preparation, we have to strain to hear a heavily accented male voice whistling and describing a vision for a place. The voice is Lee Wan Chyr, and the place is the LYC Museum. These recordings of Lee's voice were hiding in plain sight on real-to-rail tapes in the still-to-be catalogue LYC archives of the special collections of the John Rylins Library. This is the first time this recording has been digitised, and possibly the first time it has been heard since Lee recorded it. Petz uses this sound recording as one of the central pillars of Space and Freedom. She combines it with previously digitised video shot by Lee on an 8mm film. Films she shot herself on location and original music improvised by Steve Beresford. The film thus becomes a site for collaboration across time and with Lee and Beresford. A collective exploration of the rhythms, textures, sights and sounds of the Cumbrian landscape that's so inspired Lee. Her film has the sensibility of collage and has a companion piece to throw them up and let them sing. Her poetic film on Kurt Schwitter's exile in Norway that also ended up in the Cumbrian countryside. The historian Nicolle liked to work on the dead because they stay still and do not answer back. He said, With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never solo. Cervantes is never petulant. The Mostanese never comes unreasonably. Dante never stays too long. But as Petz filmed clearly shows us that the dead can speak to us. But for that we have to be willing to listen. I want to end not so much with a conclusion but a proposition that there is in the discipline of art history an impulse to disentangle entangled histories, to reduce the complex and the messy to tidy pockets of monographic depth neat with sharp edges. I've argued for a need for historical research that exceeds national and institutional frames that is more than singular art historians and individual subjects in single institutions one object at a time. So undertaking inquiries that are cross-disciplinary that cross-disciplinary and geographic borders requires polyphonic, multi-authored and speculative approaches that are described elsewhere as art histories of excess. And in the case of the LYC we here are a part of two ongoing examples of such collective effort. One is speech acts and the second is this symposium which is anchored in the exhibition and brings together scholars, artists, museum directors, curators to consider the idea of exhibitions, publications, place, friendship and the function of museums as a way to think through and think with the LYC museum and art gallery. I'm going to flip through this because hopefully you've all seen this upstairs but I wanted the last word to be leaves. So this is the statement that was in the child children's art room of the LYC museum and we've reproduced upstairs and it reads, everyone can roll. You can write a poem or draw a picture or write a story with a picture put it up on the wall or take it with you or leave it neatly on the table. Enjoy yourself but don't waste paper. The paper is free. Please leave the table tidy. Thank you. So tool we have about five minutes for any burning questions. Okay, tepid questions. It's part of the exhibition permanently it's not just on lunchtime today it's an installation that was temporarily switched off because it wasn't performing itself tonight but you can see it at any of the time because we're going to be at the exhibition. Thank you. Me? Thank you so much for this paper. I think it's methodologically really provocative and an important way of rethinking the way that we write our histories. My question is actually a little bit more banal unfortunately than your wonderful paper. I'm curious to what extent was calligraphy part of Lee's practice because it seems to be quite different from many of the works that we've seen in your exhibition but also in other exhibitions. I'm wondering what role that played in this work. Far from being banal I think that's a great question that I feel not completely equipped to answer if I'm honest. I think there's still considerable work to do and I think one of the things that we might do is hold this question and point it to Leslie Ma a little bit later but there's copious amounts of calligraphy within the archive. He's a poet not just in Chinese but in Italian and English that also says something about his spirit and as you would have seen in Madeleine's wonderful film there is muscle memory watching him perform calligraphy. So it is very much part of I think his vocabulary but how it has been historicised, displayed and understood within part of his wider practice I think remains a question. Charles? How do you write to the music? Was it this group of people that are in cover at the time? Was it local people? Was it people that got the train from London or I guess from London? The short answer is all of the above and Kate, who curates the exhibition with me and has been leading people from all sorts from everywhere through the exhibition I think has been building up a little informal database of personal stories and anecdotes but the sheer number of artists, designers, creative people who experience the museum as a child is sort of fascinating and one of the things that is currently being looked at is the possibility to think of effect that exposure to the museum had long term effect in sort of changing people's life and one of the best stories that Kate shared with me and I forget who it was who said that it was somebody who went to the LYC Museum as a young girl and then described their shock when they found out that not every city has one. And we have within our audience Joy Dee who assisted Lee at the museum and Nick Sawyer of course who brought the two to Cumbria there will be time to table some of these up Joy, please He was known and loved and people went out there from minorities and Norma was very active in those days very very not going on and so all those people were drawn into LYC and it was like we lived in Southern at the time and we would go out there with our kids for a Saturday opening and it was just one of the highlights of the month and of course four new exhibitions together to re-comment no matter what time of year boys over there Sorry No, not at all It's a perfect example of the collaborative work of a symposium Well I think we will have the rest of the day for questions so without that thank you and encourage our first session