Organized by the Performance Research Workshop

“Imagining Confucian Audiences: Tactical Media and the Umbrella Movement”

During the 2014 Hong Kong demonstrations, a number of digitally enhanced photographs represented China’s President Xi as a participant. How might we read these imagined performances? How do they imagine their audience?

This Performance Research Workshop first will build on the concept of audience through the Confucian concepts shù 恕 (reciprocity) and (zhōng 忠 (duty), arguing that putting oneself in the other’s place is part of the analogic thinking that allows demonstrators to create a sympathetic president. The problem of other minds, however, complicates any discussion of audience, and the second part of the workshop addresses the question of how we might know other minds.