Following Takeuchi Yoshimi's concept of "back to the muti" (回到母体), curator, writer, and scholar Ou Ning's lecture, The Local Turn, moves beyond the binary framework of East and West (东洋 vs. 西洋) to consider an alternative point of departure: the Northeast, or 东北. Beginning with the idea of a localized "North," Ou examines forms of political, economic, and cultural relations that emerged in Manchuria through the entanglement of Soviet socialism, Japanese imperialism, and Western capitalism. Rather than reproducing the familiar Global North/Global South divide, he asks whether the North might serve as a generative site from which alternative vernaculars of architecture, agriculture, social organization and cultural assemblage can emerge. Drawing on decades of research into rural reconstruction, regional ecologies, and place-based artistic practice, Ou Ning explores how local technologies and forms of knowledge are shaped, adapted, sustained, and abandoned in response to specific environmental and geopolitical conditions, offering insights into strategies of resistance amid accelerating globalization and cultural homogenization.

Ou Ning is an artist, curator, and writer. His practices in different periods encompass literature, music, film, art, design, architecture, urban research, utopian study, rural reconstruction, sound geography, and alternative pedagogy. He has lived and worked in New York since 2022.