ELSEHERE Community

Conversations, criticism, and editorial features documenting contemporary artistic practice across disciplines.

Over the past few weeks, STRATUM Journal has continued to expand its growing archive of artist interviews, essays, criticism, and interdisciplinary discourse.

Recent publications include:

www.elsehereglobal.com

Đurđija’s multidisciplinary practice transforms field recordings and overheard voices into profound cultural inquiries. From wartime Yugoslavia’s radio static to New York subway arias, this conversation explores how the act of listening maps the hidden hierarchies of our world.

www.elsehereglobal.com

Yasmine Laraqui’s multidisciplinary work transforms the image into a live sociological experiment, exploring the fluid mechanics of human belonging under platform capitalism.

Alongside these features, STRATUM continues to publish essays, criticism, artist writing, and long-form editorial projects that help create a more durable public record around contemporary artistic work.

Gordon Fung works across performance, media installation, experimental video, sound, participatory theater, writing, and curatorial practice. His work moves between playful and esoteric registers, but the underlying concern is consistent: how art might help people ask better questions, become more attentive to interdependence, and remain human amid historical repetition, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation. In this edited text-based conversation, Fung reflects on collectivism, stewardship, media, Land-based knowledge, contemplative duration, and why he continues to pursue work that resists both professional narrowing and conceptual simplification.  

www.elsehereglobal.com

Gordon Fung works across performance, media installation, experimental video, sound, participatory theater, writing, and curatorial practice. His work moves between playful and esoteric registers, but the underlying concern is consistent: how art might help people ask better questions, become more attentive to interdependence, and remain human amid historical repetition, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation.

New Inside Out Artist Conversation with Li Ning

www.elsehereglobal.com

In this episode of Inside Out, ELSEHERE sits down with Li Ning for a long, unhurried conversation on the body, performance, memory, migration, loss, and the strange ways art returns us to ourselves. Moving between rural childhood, breakdance culture in 1980s China, sculpture training, grief, contemporary dance, nudity, censorship, and the body’s own knowledge, Li Ning reflects on how movement first gave him back his body, then gave him a place to belong.

Why does a person dance?

Li Ning’s answer is not about dreams, passion, or career planning.It is something harsher, and more real:

Sometimes, if you do not dance, you cannot go on living.

In this episode, we speak with Li Ning at length about the body, dance, fatherhood, injury, growing up, desire, death, and art.From a rural childhood in northern China, to the breakdance wave of the 1980s, to contemporary dance and live art, what he offers is not a story of success, but the story of how a person can be interrupted by life again and again, and how the body can keep bringing him back to himself.

Hi Friends,

We wanted to share a few new pieces published on STRATUM this week. Each one moves in a different direction, but all of them bring real depth, care, and urgency in the way they think through art, history, politics, and lived experience. We hope you’ll spend some time with them.

Communitas: An Art Manifesto

https://www.elsehereglobal.com/post/communitas-an-art-manifesto

Fish Slapping, Dancing, Feminist Disability

https://www.elsehereglobal.com/post/fish-slapping-dancing-feminist-disability

In many East Asian families, two things remain remarkably scarce.

One is the phrase “I’m sorry.” The other is tears.

They are not absent. They are simply swallowed. Tears are pushed back down the throat. Apologies are withheld before they can form. Over time, both harden into the same dull ache, a pressure that settles somewhere in the chest and stays there for years. It does not always announce itself dramatically. Most of the time, it lingers as something quieter and more difficult to name.

This is part of why family pain in East Asian contexts can be so difficult to describe. It is not always explosive. It is not always visible. It often leaves no single scene that can be cleanly pointed to as the source of injury. Instead, it accumulates through what is repeatedly denied, interrupted, or left unsaid. A feeling is dismissed. A cry is silenced. A…

Strands woven into eternity.

What becomes of a single strand of fallen hair?

In China, the answer is hair embroidery—a 1,300-year-old intangible cultural heritage stitched from human hair.

Unlike silk embroidery painted in bright colors, it uses only natural shades of hair. Artisans weave quiet beauty into every stitch, creating ink wash textures that feel soft and alive.

Keratin in hair guards these works against time, insects and fading, holding memories steady for centuries. It began with devout prayers in the Tang Dynasty, and now lives in the careful hands of modern inheritors.

This is not about preserving a relic. It’s about tucking life, love and time into every tiny stitch.