Aesthetic Resistance: A poetic artist deconstructs surveillance and control

  • Artist Keynote
  • Cinema
  • Wednesday 21.05 — 16:00 - 17:15

In this discussion, we take artist YAO Qingmei’s work The Burrow—Monitor & Control (2022) as a point of departure to explore mechanisms of bodily governance under global surveillance systems.

Inspired by Franz Kafka’s novella The Burrow, the video depicts a female security guard deeply connected to security machines, situated in an underground surveillance room of a gated middle-class community in China. In this hidden digital prison, the controller experiences the outside world—its time, nature, and weather—only through LCD screens and cameras. Yet she herself is also under constant surveillance, reflecting how individuals are disciplined and self-disciplined under invisible regimes of panoptic control.

YAO Qingmei

YAO Qingmei is a Chinese performance and visual artist whose work engages critically with
systems of power, surveillance, and public space. Blending humor, irony, and political
gestures, her performances and videos explore how the body navigates and resists
normative structures. Yao studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and Le Fresnoy – Studio
national des arts contemporains in France. Her work has been presented internationally,
including at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), OCAT (Shanghai), and ZKM (Karlsruhe). Based
between China and Europe, Yao continues to develop a practice that challenges
institutional authority and explores the poetic potential of subversion.

Dahai Zhang

Dahai Zhang is a queer transnational culture critic working in the areas of critical theory, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, political aesthetics, and Sinophone studies. His current research focuses on East Asian modernity, Sinophone transnationalism, and contemporary Sinophone art. He also hosts a podcast titled State of Exception (例外状态).
Dahai holds a BA in Philosophy and Linguistics from Simon Fraser University in Canada and an MA in Cultural Studies from KU Leuven. He’s set to begin his PhD at the University of Antwerp in 2025.

Jiao Feng

Privacy Salon

FENG Jiao is a Ph.D. candidate at VUB, as well as an independent curator and researcher based between Belgium and China. Her curatorial work explores the politics of aesthetics, the potential of micro-histories, and the complex interplay between place, history, and poetic resistance. Currently, she is conducting a doctoral project titled “Big History, Small Histories – The Urgency to revisit Chinese Contemporary Art”(tbd) at VUB, alongside a survey-based study on artistic practices immersed in the techno-social landscape of the Pan-China region.

Thierry Vandenbussche

Privacy Salon

Thierry Vandenbussche is the Art & Event Director of Privacy Salon in Brussels. He's co-coordinating CPDP and its side events. Thierry has been organizing events and curating thought provoking exhibitions since the turn of the century when he launched Courtisane, a platform for film and audiovisual arts and later arts organisations like Outlandish (photography), stilll gallery and stilll office. In 2019 he co-curated the exhibition 'Festival of Control', a show actually dealing with issues like privacy and data control. He reinforces the team with vivid enthusiasm and a healthy sense of urgency.