a cut became an opening

Exhibition opening reception: Saturday, 10 October 2026, 4–6pm About A cassette arrives with a wound in it. Its edge notched, its case cracked; sometimes a track disappears into a burst of distorted noise. Intended as waste, surplus music was discarded by international record companies, shipped to China as plastic scrap, then repaired and circulated through a grey market. During the 1990s, these dakou (打口) – literally, ‘cut’ – recordings carried underground music to people across the country. The incision that rendered the object commercially worthless also redirected its life. A cut became an opening. Names, images, and rumours of bands often travelled ahead of the recordings themselves. Listeners knew artists they had not yet heard and read about albums that had not yet reached them. As dakou , and later the internet, made this music newly available, decades of sound seemed to arrive almost at once – punk beside new wave beside metal – chronology compressed into the time it took to pass a cassette between friends. For those listening, musical linages could be absorbed out of sequence, displaced from their original contexts and available for attachment, identification, and misuse. Subculture was encountered through the debris of an archive already broken open. a cut became an opening , the inaugural exhibition within Asymmetry’s Configurations , begins with the fragmented archive of Hang on the Box (挂在盒子上), the Beijing band formed in 1998 amid these belated and overlapping arrivals. Widely described as ‘China’s first all-female punk band’, the group gained prominence through this designation, which also risked eclipsing the nuances and changes that unfolded over time. Their material record reaches the exhibition under similarly partial conditions, dispersed across people and places; much is inaccessible, while some may no longer exist. a cut became an opening takes these gaps and absences as a point of departure, placing remnants from the archive into relation with works by artists and collectives Bernadette Corporation, Ruth Angel Edwards & Chloée Maugile, Ma Qiusha, Maggie Lee, Peng Zuqiang, and Shenggy Shen. When footage of Hang on the Box periodically interrupts the works, swelling in unison across separate temporalities, distinct histories are briefly drawn into a shared frequency. The archive momentarily punctures the present tense as something active and recurrent, rearranging the field around it. Hang on the Box functions as an initial disturbance: a way of opening questions about how cultural narratives are produced, preserved, and made legible. Through this constellation, the exhibition’s curatorial methodology asks what other meanings might emerge from unexpected proximities, tensions, and encounters. a cut became an opening is curated by Jessica Kwok, Head of Programmes and Curatorial, with Jiaying Kou, Publications and Programmes Lead. Configurations takes its name from the proposition that exhibitions are not static containers for finished knowledge, but momentary spatial and cross-temporal relations. A configuration suggests a shifting arrangement: one in which artworks, materials, ideas, and histories are brought into renewed contact, allowing established interpretive frameworks to be unsettled and reconstructed. Read more Toggle Installation Film / Video Photography Prints Painting Mixed media