DRC No. 12: A "Migratory" Site of Glocal Specificity.

This article draws a generative parallel between two multimedia exhibitions, 55 Days at Peking (2017) and Diplomatic Residence Compound (2016) presented at DRC No. 12—a nonprofit art space located within the Diplomatic Residence Compound in Beijing, which is often abbreviated to DRC. Although it is not quite an area of extraterritoriality, DRC has created an alternative diplomatic domain of cross-border engagement partly outside the straitjackets of state control and regimentation. This article investigates how the works presented at DRC No. 12 construct a "migratory" site of aesthetic encounters—where things, bodies, and images are set in motion physically or conceptually, unsettling any notions of spatial stability and temporal continuity—and how DRC No. 12 as an exhibition space allows artists and viewers to reconsider and reconfigure the connections and boundaries between private and public, past and present, and domestic and foreign through immediate site-specific practice of making or perceiving art, bringing to the fore the contingency, heterogeneity, and mutability of one's sense of identity, place, history, and culture. It also delves into the ways in which DRC No. 12 explores and demonstrates a glocal model of art and exhibition making, concurrently aligning with and disrupting a range of institutional apparatuses of supports, constraints, and controls at the local, national, and transnational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]