Paul HAN

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Paul HAN

Participating Project	Curator Residency Program
Activity Base	Shanghai
City / Place stayed	Tokyo
Period	2026.9 - 2026.11

Purpose of the residency

During my residency, I will research the afterlife of defeated politics through networks of second-hand bookshops, independent archives, screenings, and forgotten publications. Instead of documenting labour history itself, but to describe the declination of the marginalized groups.

How do abandoned futures continue to shape the present? Which histories remain legible, and which survive only as fragments, annotations, or out-of-print books?

This research will serve as the basis for lectures, future writing projects (both fictional and non-fictional), extending my broader inquiry into how acts of preservation, selection, and circulation determine what cultures remember, and what they quietly allow to disappear.

Plan during the residency

• Conduct archival research in Tokyo's second-hand bookshops, libraries, and independent archives, focusing on labour movements, social activism, and out-of-print publications.
• Build relationships with artists, writers, translators, publishers, universities, and researchers to establish long-term collaborations and expand future research beyond the residency. Considering forms like interviews, screenings, panel talks, or video essays.
• Visit museums, artist-run spaces, and historically significant urban sites to study how histories of labour, industrialisation, and social movements are preserved, reinterpreted, or omitted within contemporary cultural narratives.
• A visual + textual journal of 90 days of residency. Compiled with photos that I take in Tokyo. The result (pages + films) will be presented, ideally as a recap of this residency, or to be used in the future as part of my long-term research.

Creator Information